COMMENTARY Donald Trump certainly leans fascist — but outright calling him a fascist risks insulting actual fascists' victims, just as equating Kamala Harris with communist dictators insults theirs.
As this wretched presidential election draws to an end, former President Donald Trump’s opponents are now openly uttering what they once refrained from calling him: a fascist.
But as much as I too am appalled by Trump’s sociopathic rhetoric and behavior, I can’t join them.
Back in June, the political action committee Mad Dog PAC erected a billboard on the Palmetto Expressway that said, in Spanish, “No to Dictators. No to Trump.” For emphasis, it pasted Trump’s mug opposite the late Cuban despot Fidel Castro.
I didn’t agree with the billboard then. And I don’t agree with it now — even though, as it appears an alarmingly good bet that Trump will win the presidency again, it’s now widely acceptable to fire the f-word his way, as Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump's former chief of staff, John Kelly, did this week.
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I certainly don’t condemn them for that — nor do I mean to defend Trump and his fascist odor.
Like his Mussolini-esque musings about unleashing the military on his enemies if he wins. His Hitler-esque rants about immigrants “poisoning” America’s blood. His Pinochet-esque warnings, via the dystopian Project 2025, about making our democratic institutions bend to his narcissistic whims.
And, of course, the constitutional hoodlum horror of Jan. 6.
It’s just that I can’t bring myself — so far — to definitively call Trump Der Führer. Yes, Trump was and is frighteningly unfit to be President. But his presidency was more monstrous disaster than murderous dictatorship. Which brings me to another reason for not yet literally equating him with Mussolini — or Castro, as Mad Dog's billboard did:
Until Trump does prove himself that kind of ruler — which is eminently possible — labeling him as such risks issuing an insult to the victims of Mussolini, Hitler, Pinochet and all of history's other genuinely fascist tyrants.
I certainly don't mean to defend Trump's fascist odor. But until he does prove himself to be a genuine fascist, I can only call it that — a foul smell.
I’d be a tad hypocritical if I did brand him as a fascist. I've slammed right-wingers for smearing Democrats, including Harris, as Marxist-communist dictators in the mold of Castro, Stalin or Maduro, which only trivializes the real suffering those tyrants wrought.
I have no compunction about calling out Trump or any government leader who drives in authoritarianism’s direction — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has turned that way so often he’s run out of power steering fluid — but I do try to think twice about unequivocally declaring them totalitarians the way, say, Amnesty International would define it.
Boomerang target
Otherwise, I might as well paint a boomerang target on my forehead. Hanging billboards that flatly if not falsely say, “Trump is Castro. Trump is Hitler,” simply hands Trump and DeSantis and their supporters a juicier invitation to keep witch-hunting anyone they want to cast as godless Bolsheviks.
It helps them normalize the witch-hunting. That’s the last thing we need in South Florida, where today too many candidates win office precisely by proclaiming their rivals socialistas just because they don’t adhere to the MAGA dogma that Trump is God’s vicar on earth.
As the vilification of the so-called socialistas has become default procedure, it’s also hardened sympathy for — if not glorification of — right-wing autocrats around the hemisphere and the world.
Take the grandstanding event that Miami’s Republican U.S. Rep.’s Maria Elvira Salazar and Carlos Gimenez hosted here this week to denounce leftist Honduran President Xiomara Castro.
I’ll be first in line to criticize Honduras’ leader. She’s turned out to be just one more old-school Latin lefty who coddles left-wing dictatorships in the region, like Venezuela’s, while indulging corruption at home.
But what Salazar and Gimenez conveniently left out of their anti-socialista schtick was their irresponsible silence about Xiomara Castro’s right-wing predecessor, Juan Orlando Hernández. Last March, after he’d been extradited to the U.S., a federal jury in New York convicted Hernández for essentially selling Honduras to violent drug trafficking cartels.
Hernández’s crimes — including a corruption scheme that pillaged $350 million from Honduras’ healthcare system — were an open secret in Washington during his presidency. But the likes of Salazar and Gimenez didn’t dare rebuke him. Doing so would have undermined their Miami vote-gathering motto: anything liberal is diabolical, anything conservative is divine.
That’s not the kind of pat thinking those who oppose Trump’s fascist leanings want to fall into.
But they risk it now by calling him a fascist outright.
