🎥 Trump’s #fascist project is the construction of a #fascist_system (#othering_of_foreigners, #minorities, the fusion of state and capital, #religious_nationalism, expansion abroad, and the #subordination_of_women by reducing their dignity to childbirth, the kitchen, and the church): from 1975 to 2021, #neoliberalism #stole more than $50 trillion from the assets of the bottom 90 percent and poured it into the pockets of the 1 percent #oligarchy👇👇👇 👈 Conversation between Jennifer Welch and Heather Cox Richardson @HC_Richardson, professor of history at Boston College, author of the newsletter Letters from an American, with more than six million readers, and of books including Democracy Awakening, How the South Won the Civil War, To Make Men Free, Wounded Knee, and The Death of Reconstruction ✅ 1 — Claims 🔺1.1 Trump’s project is not an accident; it is the building of a system. Its elements are those named in the title: the othering of foreigners and minorities, the fusion of state and capital, religious nationalism, expansion abroad, and the subordination of women. 🔺1.2 America’s detention sites are camps; people are dying. The ship called “America does not do this” has sailed. The severity is the system, not an exception. 🔺1.3 The split screen of the September 11 anniversary—Trump asleep at the Pentagon versus the manufactured uproar over the embrace between Mamdani and AOC—is a dual test of legitimacy: the Republican body is always legitimate; the Democratic and minority body is always a performance. 🔺1.4 From the 1980s on, Democrats are treated as illegitimate because they represent ethnic, gender, and religious minorities; Republicans, by definition, are the ones who ought to govern. Othering the minority is the prelude to the system. 🔺1.5 From Nixon and the 1971 Powell Memo, the party saw that a majority wanted the modern state built after 1933; so it brought religious traditionalists into the party by weaponizing abortion in 1972, before Roe. Religious nationalism is the tool for breaking a social majority. 🔺1.6 The declared aim was anti-abortion; the practical content was the subordination of women: out of politics and the modern economy, dignity reduced to childbirth, the kitchen, and the church. Reagan signed California’s liberal abortion law in 1967; the 1983 “evil empire” speech is more about abortion than about the Soviet Union. 🔺1.7 Evangelicals put Trump over the line in 2024. January 6 was explicit: the vote does not matter; we will take the government. 🔺1.8 Leaders did not necessarily believe the religion; what they believed was the rejection of business regulation and of the taxes a regulatory state requires. Religion, sexism, and race became the cover for remaining in power so that the transfer of wealth would stay hidden. 🔺1.9 From 1975 to 2021, neoliberalism moved more than $50 trillion from the assets of the bottom 90 percent into the pockets of the 1 percent oligarchy. “Owning the libs” is the method; class theft is the substance. 🔺1.10 Republicans called the 1920s “our economy”; after 1929 they had no answer but cutting wages. Eisenhower accepted a middle way: regulation, a basic safety net, infrastructure, civil rights, a rules-based order. The fascist fusion of state and capital is the negation of that middle way. 🔺1.11 Brown in 1954 gave movement conservatives the pretext that a strong federal government would break local custom—meaning segregation. They are not ideological conservatives; they are radicals of a return to the 1920s and of the recapture of wealth. 🔺1.12 Trump has torn up the protective settlement and is expanding outward: war, stakes in firms, the Venezuela–Greenland pattern. After the war, more than a billion people were lifted from poverty under the rules-based order; tearing that order up is the global cost of the same project. 🔺1.13 Surrounding oneself with fools is the authoritarian pattern. Hegseth went from Fox weekends to the Pentagon because a merit system would never have put him there; hence the blind loyalty. Government is a television series; Susie Wiles scripts each day as an episode that ends in Trump’s favor. 🔺1.14 Fascism is a political system, not only the Holocaust. Mussolini took the fusion of state and capital from the unity of war: invent an enemy; dissolve the individual into a collective movement. Jumping to the ovens cuts off the argument about the system. 🔺1.15 America is not yet a completed fascist country; otherwise this conversation would be impossible. But the administration’s project is to install that system, and it slides from fascism into authoritarianism. 🔺1.16 The strong institutions capitulated first: the Senate, universities, law firms, conglomerate media. The street bent later. The Senate was built to stop a demagogue; it rolled over. 🔺1.17 Resistance comes from “I can’t,” not from a plan to be a hero: Mills said, see you in court; Beatty stood up to his face. 🔺1.18 The next fight is the ballot of 2026 and 2028 and the map of 2030. Trump will get worse, not better. ✅ 2 — Arguments 🔺2.1 If fascism is measured only by the ovens, every stage before the ovens is denied. The title is right: the criterion is the construction of a system. 🔺2.2 Othering the foreigner and the minority is a necessary condition of fusion; without an enemy, the individual is not dissolved into the collective movement. 🔺2.3 If religious nationalism becomes a party weapon before a court decision, it is not jurisprudence; it is coalition engineering to cover class theft. 🔺2.4 The subordination of women by reduction to childbirth, kitchen, and church is a pillar of the system, not a cultural side issue. Without it, the traditionalist does not enter the party and the majority that wants the modern state is not broken. 🔺2.5 If the laws of the same period send $50 trillion upward, the story of tradition is the pretext and neoliberalism is the aim. Fascism is the political superstructure of that transfer. 🔺2.6 The fusion of state and capital ceases to be a metaphor when Trump takes stakes in firms; it is Mussolini’s definition. 🔺2.7 Expansion abroad—wars of choice, oil, territory—is the reinforcement of the system at home, not a separate foreign policy. 🔺2.8 Visible stupidity has a function: destroying the state is reduced to saying no, so that the complexity of governing, which obstructs the oligarch, leaves the stage. 🔺2.9 Speech police and pre-crime are the continuation of othering. Piers Morgan’s leap to the Holocaust is the mechanism that denies the system. 🔺2.10 The first surrender of the strong is the conglomerate’s bottom-line rationality; the resistance of the weak is principle. A constitution without a Senate jealous of its own power is paper. 🔺2.11 If midterm manipulation and the 2030 maps win, the next ballot does not change the system; it changes the field of play. ✅ 3 — Evidence 🔺3.1 Detention camps and reported deaths; Trump’s stakes in American companies. 🔺3.2 The Pentagon nap; the distorted clip of the Mamdani–AOC embrace. 🔺3.3 The Powell Memo of 1971; the weaponizing of abortion in 1972; Roe 1973; the California law of 1967; Reagan’s 1983 evangelical speech. 🔺3.4 More than $50 trillion, 1975–2021; record diesel; the Iran war under Hegseth. 🔺3.5 Eisenhower’s letter against “just tell us what to do”; Brown 1954; Roosevelt’s four terms. 🔺3.6 Hegseth’s appointment; Wiles’s daily series; Tuberville and the three branches. 🔺3.7 The cancellation of McLemore; Miller’s national-security memo; the title Not Today Fascist and Morgan’s question. 🔺3.8 The Senate’s collapse; Mills; Beatty; the 250 project. ✅ 4 — Conclusions 🔺4.1 Trump is the end of forty years of system-building: othering, religious nationalism, the subordination of women, expansion abroad, and the fusion of state and capital on the bed of neoliberal theft from the 90 percent to the 1 percent. 🔺4.2 Fascism is here if you look at the system; it is not complete if the opponent can still speak. Denial by leaping to the ovens is itself the mechanism of normalization. 🔺4.3 The camp is the moral test of that system, not a separate intensity. Neoliberalism does not become this naked without a fascist superstructure. 🔺4.4 The practical question: do you measure liberal democracy by the five pillars of the title, or do you wait for someone to say that because the Holocaust has not happened, the theft of $50 trillion, the camps, and the subordination of women are not fascism?