Note: This article may contain outdated information due to America’s political climate changing hourly.

“We all saw that, right?” I asked when Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, threw up a Sieg Heil salute on live television in front of a crowd of thousands. It was the day of the inauguration, January 20th, 2025. Donald Trump had just taken power as the 47th president almost three hours before, and Musk was sworn in as the head of DOGE (Department Of Government Efficiency), a new department under the Trump administration. Musk, a man representing Trump and our government, not only threw up the fascist salute once but twice on  national news. But this isn’t the first time the Trump administration has done and said similar things before. 

“In four years, you don’t have to vote again,”  Trump said at an event run by the Christian conservative group Turning Point Action in July of 2024. 

“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” Darren Bettie, working as the State Department’s Senior Official in Public Diplomacy,  tweeted on X a month before the 2024 election. Bettie also used to work as a speechwriter for Trump in 2018 before being fired.

So what do these three things all have to do with each other? All of these are warnings. They are warnings for our country that fascism, the same form of government that killed more than 11 million people in Europe, the same government that stripped people of their freedoms and rights, is starting to run rampant in America. How does it happen? A weakened democratic system and a leader that is power hungry. The descent to fascism isn’t a fast one, but once it starts, it’s hard to stop.

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, nationalist political ideology. Unlike communism or democracy, fascism is complicated to define due to its core tenets being debated by many scholars, but it’s universally understood as a dictatorship that emphasizes ultra nationalism and repression through extreme conservative values.  

A subset of the conservative movement, the far-right ideology is at the end of the political spectrum. A hardcore, harsh version of right-wing ideas. Usually people who subscribe to this ideology are in similar movements such as neo-nazism or white nationalism, but they can also be found in some tamer modern mainstream right-wing politics. To define the far-right even further though, we have to define authoritarianism and nationalism, the biggest tenets of these ideologies and movements. 

In “The Anatomy of Fascism,” historian Robert O. Paxton perfectly describes authoritarianism as “the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason.” A government where the people blindly follow a leader’s rule and authority, where people’s freedoms are repressed, and power is in the hands of a few or just one, with little regard for the fact that the majority is an authoritarian government. The leader must be the only one who is right, even if it’s against rationality. Authoritarianism isn’t just a “left or right” term, but it is a vital part of fascism.

When you think of nationalism, do you think of a love for your country? Do you think of patriotic holidays like the Fourth of July and war movies where your country saves the day? Nationalism is a key tenet of modern far-right politics due to the belief that one’s country’s importance would outweigh the importance of another country. Nationalism may just be a simple loyalty to someone’s country, but it can turn extreme quickly, especially when mixed with authoritarianism.

Benito Mussolini, an Italian dictator, first coined the term “fascism” in 1915. Mussolini explained in 1927 during a speech that fascism is “everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

Democracy is a form of government that allows people to vote for their leaders. The current system of the American government is a Democratic Republic, a form of government which is a cross between a republic, when the political power is put on the people and executed by representatives, and a democracy. Fascist leaders can, and usually are, elected through a democracy, but to keep their power, leaders will take away that democracy and start to implement fascist frameworks, like Mussolini who won the popular vote in the 1924 Italian general election, did. 

Paxton refers to the German historian, Friedrich Meinecke, who thought that Nazism, a form of fascism that rose to power in 1930s Germany, had emerged from moral degeneration in which, “Machtmenschen” or powerseekers, were supported by a mass who wanted some sort of power and excitement, had triumphed over rational, “Kulturmenschen” or civilized humans. Fascists believed that their form of government was a society where “the best” ruled. 

As stated before, tenets of Fascism are defined by a far-right, authoritarian, nationalist government. Fascism also usually has characteristics of extreme militarism, social hierarchy such as Darwinism (aka natural selection theory) and determination to create the German word for people’s community, Volksgemeinschaft; when people’s rights and freedoms are made less than for the ‘greater of the nation.’ Most fascist movements don’t leave the beginning stage. That’s why when we talk about fascism, we refer to Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, because they were the regimes that could define fascism the most clearly.

WARNING: THIS SECTION CONTAINS SCREENSHOTS THAT DEPICT ANTI SEMITIC AND VIOLENT BELIEFS

I just want to start off by stating that America is not a fascist state. It never has been. But, with all the current events going on, there are some scary parallels between fascist states and America at the moment. America is slowly becoming a fascist state. 

Fascism has been in America since the late 19th century, but maybe the most well-known American fascist movement started in 1936. The German American Bund (1936-1940) followed Hitler’s model of Nazi Germany and admired fascist dictatorship. The group’s goal was to portray Nazi Germany in a better light to Americans and spread the Nazi ideology into the West. The Bund’s most significant rally was at Madison Square Garden in 1939, where it’s leaders spoke about Jewish people in an antisemitic way, such as supporting Germany’s eugenics program and calling them “job-taking Jewish refugees.”

American fascists and neo-Nazis are still around today on sites like 4Chan (which is now gone), Truth Social, Gab, Discord, and even X (Twitter.) Rather than having rallies and taking the streets to spread their ideology, they do it online, behind a screen, which is where Trump and his administration get most of their praise from neo-Nazis. 

 “Did Elon Musk just Heil Hitler at the Trump Inauguration Rally in Washington DC… This is incredible,” Evan Kilgore, a right-wing journalist, posted on X. Kilgore is also an ambassador of American nonprofit Turning Point USA.

Conservative organization, Turning Point USA, believes in teaching young voters traditional conservative values such as “patriotism, respect for life, liberty, family, and fiscal responsibility” and also “freedom, free markets, and limited government.” Charlie Kirk, founder of TPUSA, goes around the country and debates college students on campus, usually using a Ben Shapiro style of debating: not letting the other party speak, spewing nonsense, debating college students who are clearly unprepared, and having a huge following egg him on and shame the person he is debating. (Also known as destroying the opposite side with facts and logic.)

But, Turning Point USA’s main goal isn’t to “destroy” liberals or to just debate college students for the fun of it. TPUSA’s main goal is indoctrination, which not only occurs on college campuses, where they usually recruit young white men who feel alienated by society, but also with the help of social media. 

Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, an alt-right social media app, posted about Elon Musk saluting on X, saying, “Incredible things are happening already.” 

Gab is a website and app widely known for its catering to neo-nazis, white supremacists, fascists, and even conspiracy theory movements such as QAnon. Founded in 2016, Gab claims it is “the home of free speech.” but with little to no moderation, it has intentionally marketed itself to people who spread their hate and prejudice. 

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Clearly, Gab encourages this rhetoric since the founder, Torba, posts tamer but similar ideologies on his X to his users on Gab. 

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Gab is also one of the social media platforms used to indoctrinate people into the alt-right pipeline. Instead of rallies and flyers, people will go on these apps like Gab, Truth Social, X, Discord, Instagram and Tiktok, see these people romanticizing fascism and white supremacy, and think, “Well, it looks cool, I must join the bandwagon!” 

Fascists target weak and vulnerable people. When someone goes through something traumatic and they don’t have a support system, most of the time, they are looking for some sort of validation, even if that validation is from neo-nazis. It’s the same thing with children; they have gullible and naive minds, allowing someone to come in and feed them ideologies without argument from that child. They’ve always indoctrinated individuals this way, but now it’s way easier to do that, especially online when you could be spreading your ideas, not knowing if you’re actually indoctrinating someone. 

Paxton mentions that some traits of fascism alone are not fascist but together make up fascism. The “dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences.” If fascists and white supremacists believe that the left, people who may be a different economic class, and immigrants are helping with the replacement of white people, naturally, they will feel some sort of hate and urgency, which is what Paxton is saying. A new example of this is the Great Replacement Theory.

Popular in white supremacist and fascist spaces, The Great Replacement is a theory that says with the cooperation of “replacist” elites, white people will be replaced by non-white individuals. White supremacists fear that because there are so many immigrants in “white countries” like America and most of Europe, white people will cease to exist due to this “replacement.”  

“Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists,” former KKK leader, David Duke, tweeted back in 2017 after the “Unite The Right” Charlottesville rally.

“Unite The Right” was a rally that went on in Charlottesville, Virginia, from August 11th to 12th, 2017. The rally spread white nationalist and supremacist ideology in the streets of Charlottesville. Some groups that attended were far-right militias, fascists and neo-nazis, Klansmen (KKK), and neo-confederates. Groups carried flags with swastikas, the valknut (an ancient Germanic symbol that is often used in white supremacist groups), and Confederate battle flags. The rally sparked because Lee Park (now Market Street Park), a public park in Charlottesville, had taken down a statue of Robert E. Lee, an infamous Confederate general in the American Civil War. 

Donald Trump defended these white supremacists, stating that there were “very fine people on both sides.” Not only is Trump defending the counter-protesters, but also the original protesters who were spreading hate and white nationalism. He blamed the violence of the rally on the “very, very violent alt-left.” Trump also calls Robert E. Lee, a known racist who went against the American government back during the civil war, “a great general.” 

“I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breed like vermin,” Hitler said during the Reichstag speech in 1939. 

 “The radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” Trump said at a rally in 2023. 

“Individual vices always recur in peoples as long as their inner nature, their genetic composition, does not undergo any essential change,” Hitler said in 1932 during a speech in Dusseldorf. 

“I believe this, it’s in their genes and we have a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” Trump stated on a radio show with Hugh Hewitt in 2024. 

These quotes highlight a specific tenet of social and racial hierarchy in fascism. The Germans killed over six million Jews during Hitler’s rule. The Nazis believed that Jews were a ‘inferior race’ and had to be exterminated. First, Hitler made Jews leave Germany; the ones who stayed, he made second-class citizens. Later, he put them in work camps, then death camps. 

Those death camps are a product of eugenics: the belief that certain groups of people shouldn’t reproduce to improve the genetic quality of the human race. Eugenics believe that diseases and disorders only come from genetics and that should be bred out. It’s the same with minorities, with eugenics being believed to be able to breed the black, Hispanic, and even gay out of them. Eugenics is popular in white supremacist and xenophobic spaces.

You can see a similar pattern with Trump and non-white immigrants. Trump believes that immigrants are second-class citizens who are ruining America. 

“They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we have a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump stated at a rally in New Hampshire in 2023. 

America is founded on immigrants, yet Trump believes that new non-white immigrants are tainting America’s culture and population. This is the same language used by Hitler, who believed that Jews were ‘poisoning’ German culture and population. 

“And what did the state do against this mass poisoning of the nation? Nothing, absolutely nothing,” Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf,” referring to the Jewish population of Germany. 

 Trump is also calling immigration an ‘invasion,’ and by doing that, that will help him in the long run. One of the orders signed by Trump early on in his presidency uses the word ‘invasion,’ allowing him to use the Constitution. The Constitution states that “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion.” Trump can use this order to his advantage by using this passage from the Constitution.

Not only is he ordering ICE raids on citizens and immigrants alike, but he has also stated that he will be using Guantánamo Bay to hold immigrants. A US naval base, Guantánamo Bay is famous for holding the suspects of the 9/11 attacks, but also has a small separate facility to hold migrants from Haiti and Cuba who are trying to come into America illegally by boat. 

Trump wants to hold over 30,000 immigrants at Guantánamo Bay, which has no space for that amount of people. Government officials say that they will add to the existing facility. These 30,000 people are supposed to be criminals, making it a prison over a camp, but they were also holding 50 non-violent immigrants at Guantánamo Bay. The commander of the US Southern Command stated that the base would be able to hold 2,500 nonviolent migrants, but they are adding onto the base, wanting to hold at most 30,000 nonviolent migrants.   

But this is just an instance of inhumane conditions at American immigration facilities. America’s detention centers dehumanize migrants through abuse, separation of families, and even death. 

Both Trump’s detention centers and Hitler’s concentration camps are similar in their inhumane and harsh conditions. Immigration detention centers are concentration camps. A concentration camp is a prison holding a group of people who are used for internment of politically targeted groups of people like the Jews of Nazi Germany, the Muslims of the Chinese region Xinjiang, the Japanese of WWII America, and now the immigrants of current America. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a representative for New York, said in 2019 during an Instagram live that, “A presidency that creates concentration camps is fascist, and it’s very difficult to say that, because it is very difficult to accept the fact that that is how bad things have gotten, but that is how bad things have gotten.”

People won’t accept that our country has concentration camps, yet, it was the same with Germany. Many during the fascist regime didn’t believe that their own country had death and prison camps. They understood that these camps were there for enemies of the state and did not know of the conditions or what happened there, just as many Americans do not understand what is going on at detention centers.

The Fourteenth Amendment allows anyone born on American soil to become an American citizen. It’s called birthright citizenship and was signed into law right after the Civil War. The Fourteenth Amendment allowed individuals who were formerly enslaved to be officially considered citizens. It doesn’t matter if the parents are citizens or not; the child, if born in America, he or she is an American citizen. Trump is fighting this. 

Trump wants to reinterpret the phrase, found in the Fourteenth Amendment, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The phrase originally meant that anyone who is born in America is American, but Trump wants to make that phrase mean that children who have parents who are not citizens are also not American citizens. 

Jews also went through something similar during and after 1935, when they were stripped of their citizenship and didn’t have any protection from the Nazi government. This set of laws was called the Nuremberg Laws, under which only people of “German or kindred blood” who showed complete loyalty to the Reich were allowed citizenship. Jews in Germany were not considered German citizens even if born on German land. This isn’t the only difference, but one of the biggest differences between Trump’s and Hitler’s laws is that Trump is reinterpreting the already existing laws, while the Nazis created whole new laws, when they rewrote the German constitution when after they took power during the Weimar Republic. 

The whole reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment most likely won’t happen, as getting rid of birthright citizenship is very hard in the United States. Governors, attorneys general, and other political figures have sued Trump’s administration for this, and federal judges have shot down his executive action. Birthright citizenship isn’t going away, but it is being threatened.

DEI, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, is the promotion of fair treatment for minorities like people of color and disabled individuals in and outside the workspace.

Colleges, places of employment, and even federal organizations have DEI offices. Trump wants to shut down these offices. By shutting down these offices, millions of the people working in these offices will be fired, but also, now federal and private organizations that get federal funding will not have to or be allowed to hold up DEI policies, so Trump will cut their federal funding. 

Colleges can now deny students scholarships, aid, and even entry because they do not have to uphold DEI policies. Trump has declared war on DEI by implementing policies that state that universities must eliminate DEI programs to receive federal funding. He is also revising federal programs’ DEI practices in a way that will harm minority groups and uplift people like Trump. 

Forbes has been keeping a running list of major companies that are rolling back on DEI initiatives.

A group of people being affected by these DEI rollbacks are LGBTQ+ individuals. One of the first actions the Nazis took when assuming power was enforcing the ban on male homosexuality. It did not apply to women. This statute was called Paragraph 175. It had been a law since the German Empire (1871-1918) but had not been enforced, and by the 1920s, homosexuality had effectively been decriminalized. But when Hitler took power in 1933, he began enforcing this statute, taking actions like closing down gay meeting spots and arresting repeat offenders. In 1935, the Nazis re-visioned Paragraph 175 and made it even more strict. They made the crime more vague. Men could get arrested for even looking at or touching another man.

Now, instead of just gay men, it’s any LGBTQ+ person, specifically trans individuals. Trump isn’t arresting trans people, but he is trying to erase them and their identity. To read all about Trump’s policies on trans people, read Jasper Benson’s article, “Trump’s New Anti-Trans Policies Spread Fear and Danger to Trans Community,”  which explains Trump’s anti-trans policies and the fear trans people have for these policies better than I could. 

Roe v. Wade was a Supreme Court case that legalized and privatized abortion in 1973. The court ruled that the Constitution protects one’s privacy, including pregnancy and what one does with that pregnancy. This case was a landmark decision for women all over America. But, on June 24th, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion. This didn’t rid all the states of abortion, but states did now have the right to completely outlaw abortion. Three out of nine of these judges were appointed by Trump during his first term. Three out of the five judges who voted to overturn Roe v Wade were appointed by Trump. Almost 50 years of progress, taken away in a second. 

Currently, Trump wants to take away more women’s rights. The Trump administration dropped an emergency abortion lawsuit in Idaho that would have saved thousands of lives if not ignored and tossed in the trash. 

This is “a big win for unborn children in Idaho, for women and for the truth,” said Kelsey Pritchard, a director for the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America Organization. 

But it’s the complete opposite. Women will die, and so will their unborn children, who pro-lifers believe are more valuable than an actual living person’s life. It’s not about saving anybody or anyone living. It’s about control. 

Control is the biggest aspect of Fascism. When you control, you have more power. So, allow the state to control, and the people will lose their power. The opposite is democracy. Under democracy, the people chose their leaders, giving themselves power. 

“If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them,’” Trump said in an interview with Univision. 

It’s the people’s choice to elect a president, so when someone who’s running for president says that, that’s not democracy. That’s a dictatorship. However, this turned out to be rhetoric because Trump never did indict his opponents. 

He has also stated during his first term that the press is an “enemy of the people.” When the press, the people who tell the truth widely, become an “enemy of the people,” according to our country’s leader, that is a tenet of fascism. Fascism is opposed to the idea of the free press, a first amendment right. Free press are news companies owned by private owners, allowing anyone to publish a story, rather than the government, which would only allow a select few to publish articles about government-approved subjects. 

Propaganda under free press would die out due to the press being held up to a high standard, but under a dictatorship, usually propaganda is the only form of mass media. It is the act of spreading information that is one, misleading, and two, influences people’s opinions to further an agenda. It can be used in a positive way like inspiring unity during a time of crisis but is also used by dictatorships to control and manipulate. 

Propaganda under a dictatorship is a form of the removal of freedom of speech because that is the only information you are getting from the mass media. I am printing this article on freedom of the press, the First Amendment. Fascism would not allow me to write this article. 

I remember exactly where I was on Jan. 6th, 2021. I was in 7th grade, and it was during COVID, so I was just getting off of school on my Chromebook. 

“Abi! Turn on the news,” my brother came out of his room, screaming.

So I did, and what I saw was horrifying. An attempted attack on democracy. The worshiping of an almost ‘god-like’ figure who had fairly lost the election.

Hours before that, Trump had told this same mob of people, “If you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore” and “We are going to the capital.” Trump did not join them at the capital to try to overthrow the government; rather, he sat in the White House and tweeted, taking hours to send the National Guard to Capitol Hill. 

Jan 6th was, as Paxton puts it, “the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success,” as stated in his book when talking about another trait of fascism. That day was violent. Five people died, and many of the officers who had been protecting the capital were injured. But to protect what they believe in, Trump supporters were so loyal to the success of Trump, they’d do anything, even if that meant an attempted violent coup that resulted in 2.73 million dollars in damages and the death of multiple individuals. 

Trump supporters who weren’t at the Capitol that day still voted for a man in 2024, and some even plan on trying to vote for him in 2028.

“We are going to win four more years. And then after that, we’ll go for another four years,” Trump said in 2020 to his supporters. 

Trump wanted to continue to be president in 2020, but also on into the future, past his legal term limit; the recent comments of Steve Bannon, a right-wing podcaster, make this relevant again. 

The 22nd amendment made it so presidents can only run for two four-year terms, so they can be president for eight years. The constitution states that, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

Now, how can Trump do this if the Constitution does not allow this?

Trump could do a number on the amendment if he gets support behind a movement to repeal the 22nd, though this is nearly impossible, as most agree that eight years is suitable for presidents. Trump could also just refuse to leave, breaking down our current democracy and ringing in a new era of American politics. 

But, the most likely way he would do it is by twisting the words of the constitution, though the wording is pretty straightforward. Though, knowing Trump, could become reality.

Many scholars believe that we have entered some sort of authoritarianism that will continue to expand. Princeton sociologist, Kim Lane Schepple believes that “We are on a very fast slide into what’s called competitive authoritarianism.”

Though, the type of authoritarianism that these scholars are talking about are ones similar to Turkey and Hungary. There are still elections in those countries, but they are neither fair nor equal, also known as an autocracy, where there is only one complete ruler.

To be clear. America has systems to make sure this does not happen. Trump does not have the same type of popular support that the leaders of Turkey and Hungary have.  

In a predominantly white county, racism and white nationalism is more prevalent. Norristown is an exception, where a large portion of our population is Black or Latinx, but 30 minutes north, in Lower Frederick Township, a resident displayed a flag with a swastika on it outside of his home. 

Another incident happened in Upper Moreland, where swastikas were spray-painted outside an elementary school. 

In 2022, Pennsylvania was cited as one of the highest states with white supremacist propaganda. The same year, 473 racist incidents were reported in PA. Last year, 285 hate crimes were reported; lower than 2022, but still at an all-time high. 

This may not seem like a lot in comparison to the rest of the country, where hate and fascism are more prevalent, but incidents like these are slowly growing in the country and in our own community. 

With the new administration that seems to allow things like this to happen, white supremacist and fascist rallies and incidents will happen more often. People will get bolder, and so will Trump’s administration. Their actions will become more bigoted and hate-filled. And our “American dream” will be on a direct path to a fascist nightmare, where it may be too late to do anything about it.