Is Trump actually a fascist – and why does the answer matter?

While Democratic strategists debate whether or not their attack ads labeling Donald Trump a fascist have been effective, experts and academics told the Guardian his campaign and the Republican party he now heads have clear autocratic sympathies and political qualities that are firmly in line with fascism movements historically.

Put together, that makes any Trump victory this week and his return to the White House for a second presidential term a clear threat to US democracy, they added.

“There couldn’t be a more obvious example of a fascist social and political movement about to take power,” said Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor whose new book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, looks at the global playbook of fascists through the lens of America and beyond.

Stanley continued: “Trump and the people behind him have already promised to replace the government at all levels with loyalists. [LGBTQ+] citizens, particularly trans citizens and their families, will have to leave the country. Political opponents will be targeted in some way ranging from financial penalties to prison.”

Even Trump’s own longest-serving chief-of-staff during his time in the White House, John Kelly, put his former boss under “the general definition of a fascist”, the same political category as infamous Axis leaders Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Kamala Harris openly agreed with that assessment.

Trump and the people behind him have already promised to replace the government at all levels with loyalists. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Dr Brian Hughes, the associate director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, said Trump has for years been accused of mimicking the rise to power of Hitler and Mussolini, for good reason.

“I think it’s important to remember that fascism isn’t a binary. Fascism is a process,” said Hughes in an interview with the Guardian. “Since the very beginning of the Trump campaign in 2015, there’s been a lot of denialism and a lot of whistling past the graveyard, but the symptoms keep adding up.”

At the inception of his administration, Hughes pointed out, Trump instituted the Muslim ban and described Latino immigration as a sort of infestation, all classic fascistic attacks on “an enemy within, a group that can be targeted and scapegoated for all the problems of society”.

Then came the strongman tactics of trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election – a cause still pursued by many Trump acolytes who see him as a “fascist imaginary”, as Hughes puts it.

“Now we finally have stated policy goals of targeting political enemies, not just through lawfare, but also through violence and myriad other examples of plans to govern in a way that mirrors 20-century fascism,” he said.

Both Hitler and Mussolini similarly practiced the classic performance of screaming and hand-gesturing at rallies, threatening their enemies during their rise to power. Trump’s off-the-cuff speech style, now and in previous campaigns, has become synonymous with that kind of machismo and callback to the 30s.

Even while in power, Trump set the stage for his comeback and the basis for what Stanley sees as a surefire fascist state to come.

“The courts will be replaced by loyalists, as we have already seen with the supreme court of the United States,” he said, referring to three ultra-conservative justices Trump already installed while in power. In Nazi-Germany, government officials at all levels, legal and bureaucratic, had to declare strict allegiances to the party.

Since those Trump appointments, the nation’s highest court delivered landmark rulings overturning abortion rights and bestowing kingly powers to the presidency, almost akin to the Third Reich or Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who ruled over his country until 1975.

Critics say LGBTQ+ rights are next on his hit list of issues for the courts, if Trump returns to power. Notably, the fascist governments of Hitler and Mussolini outlawed queer, Roma and Jewish people, disappearing who they deemed political undesirables in a series of mass killings or jailings that led up to their so-called “final solution” and the Holocaust.

But the first stage of Trump’s potential fascist-like state, as Stanley told the Guardian, will involve solidifying the authority of a single party, not unlike how prime minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary (often called a “neo-fascist”) has eviscerated any semblance of an opposition in the former eastern bloc country.

If Trump wins, Stanley said, “America will be a one-party state from now on” forecasting that “JD Vance or perhaps Donald Trump Jr” will then replace Trump in the cult of personality as he ages or dies.

“There will be no more meaningful federal elections,” he added.

Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), has for decades been a mainstay critic, analyst and academic authority on the American far right and said she fears the current political climate is veering towards fascism.

Beirich called attention to how nationalist flirtations and pro-nativist periods in the 19th and 20th centuries have already given birth to organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, and to eugenics and the terroristic suppression of Black people all over the country in multiple eras, until the civil rights movement established legal equalities.

“There was also a movement in support of the Nazi government, with groups like the American Bund prior to world war two,” said Beirich, referring to a pro-Hitler and German-American political organization founded in 1936, which openly promoted Nazism.

In 1939, mere months before the invasion of Poland, the Bund held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Many critics compared that rally with Trump’s own election rally in the famous arena last weekend. During the “love fest”, as the Republican candidate labeled it, speakers made several racist statements, including a joke about the entire island island of Puerto Rico being “garbage”.

“So my takeaway is that anti-immigrant sentiment and race science, which is embraced by our growing white supremacist movements, have an American pedigree,” said Beirich. “It is a worry that we could enter a new phase that revives this vile history.”

Beirich has exposed the inner workings of several American neo-Nazi groups for years and says those types of groups see the current political climate as an opportunity.

“The far right is certainly in a more powerful position today than it has been in decades,” she said, describing extremists who are desperately afraid of the racist great replacement theory, once promoted by Tucker Carlson on Fox News before his firing.

Beirich said that “whatever happens on election day, these growing, empowered far-right movements aren’t going away”.

“They will form a cohesive political force for years to come, particularly as demographic change inevitably transforms this country from having a white majority to no ethnic majority,” she continued.

Many of the neo-Nazi terrorist groups recently born in America that Beirich has tracked were also admirers of the past. Members of the Atomwaffen Division were known to worship the Third Reich and Mussolini, making a point of collecting artifacts from that era.

Francesco Marone, an assistant professor at the University of Teramo and a researcher at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, whose own country gave birth to fascism, is less concerned or convinced that Trump is a fascist as much as that his aggressive actions threaten broader western political cohesion.

“On the other hand, experts can identify partial similarities between Trump and Mussolini and fascist tendencies, such as a charismatic personality, capable of promoting a cult of personality, the emphasis placed on a presumed profound decadence and humiliation of the country, racist and male chauvinist attitudes, authoritarian tendencies (but in different degrees), ultranationalism, a propensity to demonize the political opponent,” he said in an emailed message.

Marone says Trump is an endemic character seen across the world and isn’t quite a by-definition fascist, per se.

“These general traits are shared by radical rightwing leaders active in other liberal democracies in the west,” he said. “Certainly, the growth of an illiberal radical right appears to be a problem on an international scale in our age.”