Where It's All Heading: The Fascist Right Post-Trump

Watching parts of the Right grow weary of Trump might be hopeful, but without needed change the situation will only worsen

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It’s a schism.

When it comes to religions or movements or cults, there comes a moment where the internal conflicts and disagreements reach a fever pitch and the whole splinters. In regards to the Make America Great Again Movement, as represented and directed by Donald Trump, this schism was a long time coming.

It helps to understand MAGA as both a political movement and a cult. There is a wide swathe of followers and supporters, ranging from those who believe he is literally a messianic figure sent by God and others who consider him useful for their own purposes and projects. On one end of the spectrum are Christian Nationalists, those who have spent their lives submerged in the kind of extremist and paranoid stories that myself and other ex-evangelicals have escaped. They were primed for decades to believe the United States of America, as God’s chosen country, was under siege by demonic forces and, eventually, it would culminate in a great battle between Good and Evil. These acolytes filter everything about Trump through this lens, which has been helped by both Christian grifters and Trump himself. Then, there are others who see through Trump’s bullshit and recognize him as an idiot. But a useful idiot.

Within the confines of MAGA, these separate forces have made for uneasy allies. MAGA is, itself, a front for wealth class projects, a means of forwarding austerity and wealth redistribution as capitalism requires authoritarianism to continue functioning, and so its actions, and Trump’s actions, are in constant conflict with both the true believers and those who have sought to use his hatred, his racism, his sexism, and his fascistic instincts to change the country and society at large. The internal contradictions here are bursting forth.

Though I spent a large portion of my life immersed in the evangelical component, I only came to understand the second group roughly a decade ago. In my own run-ins with Neo-Nazis and Neo-Fascists, I felt a need to study them. I spent hours upon hours reading their writings, perusing their forums and communications, and what I eventually grasped was extremely radicalized white supremacists and illiberals understood Trump as a stepping stone toward fascism within the United States of America. They laughed at him. Mocked him and his supporters. But what they intuited, rightly, was that Trump and MAGA would prepare America for what they hoped to achieve.

Recently there has been a lot of talk of Trump supporters “turning away” from Trump. We hear these anecdotes pretty regularly. They’re mad that Trump isn’t solving the economic problems. They’re pissed at his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, his association with Israel, any number of things. And it has been theorized that these “disenchanted” individuals may find themselves voting against Trump or the Republican Party in the near future. There is some truth to this. One of the stranger aspects of modern politics is the swing-swing-swing voter, those people who support Barack Obama before supporting Trump before supporting Biden before supporting Trump once again. Those people do exist and, considering the worsening nature of conditions, they’ll likely swing again if…there are elections.

But what is missing in this reaction and the analysis is something else entirely. It doesn’t get discussed much in mainstream media or in pundit circles, but one of the fastest growing political groups in this country is an association of Americans who have been frustrated with Trump and his project and are turning toward the Neo-Nazis and the Neo-Fascists.

To state it clearly: if we are not careful, we may look back at the Trump Era and see it as the precursor to something much more dangerous and much more destructive.

This possibility originates from a few essential factors.

• America is in obvious decline and living conditions are worsening because of intentional scarcity and historical inequality

• Trump’s political ascendance, and the the ascendance of his collaborators, has normalized illiberalism and authoritarian actions; mainstreamed the open expression of racism, sexism, xenophobia, gay and trans phobia; and shifted subjective reality to reflect their paranoid fantasies that America is a battleground

• MAGA’s existence as a faux-populist reaction to conditions on behalf of the wealth and oligarchical classes, and the continued execution of the wealth and oligarchical class’s agendas, means the cognitive dissonance and frustration within the MAGA supporter base will only increase with time

• Online systems designed by tech oligarchs who are openly fascistic incentivize radicalizing material that has created a pipeline from MAGA-friendly media to more and more extreme content, including Neo-Nazi personalities like Nick Fuentes and others

• That project, which has focused primarily on young, white men, has laid the groundwork for gradual radicalization and acceptance of Neo-Nazi and Neo-Fascist ideas and frameworks

Considering these factors, it isn’t hard to see where this might go. Trump’s position as an outsider previous to the 2016 and then the 2024 Elections allowed for the ideas to fester but also gave space for supporters to imagine what he might do if given power. But, once in office, the hard contrast between what he promised to do and what he actually does becomes more and more stark. Trump is not going to fix the problems. Trump is not going to carry out the populist agenda he promised to receive votes. His only purpose is to enrich himself, enrich his friends, and, when he carries out fascistic and authoritarian violence, it will be to serve his own fantasies of retribution and quell the very populism he used to gain power in the first place.

Watching MAGA and MAGA-adjacent personalities express frustration with Trump is a result of this conflict and observing their conversations, their communications, and their interactions, I can tell you that rather than becoming more open to the Democratic Party, they are following a predictable pattern to the Far Right and explicit Neo-Nazi ideas. In this world, they aren’t clinging to QAnon conspiracy theories - and remember that QAnon was always just The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with keywords changed to obscure the antisemitic components - but moving more and more toward a belief in pure, unvarnished antisemitic rhetoric and worldviews.

When you combine this ideological and political shift with the fact that tech oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have, respectively, expressed overtly illiberal, antidemocratic, and even eugenic beliefs, and you think of how their technologies have been used to radicalize followers and create surveillance and persuasion systems, the possibility grows even larger.

I do think people are right in viewing this schism as an opportunity, but it isn’t as simple as hoping these supporters will cleave off and join the “resistance” or whatever you want to call this. Politics and psychology are a lot more complicated than that. Trump’s following resulted from a combination of white supremacist paranoia, fear of the future, and a frustration with the political status quo. He succeeded in shifting the status quo, but the moment he made that shift the frustration was either going to be sated or grow. We know which way that turned.

The idea that these disenchanted Trump voters will suddenly awaken and start supporting Democratic politicians is as misguided as the former “demographics are destiny” beliefs that arose around Obama’s election. Democratic strategists and commentators all looked at the changing demographics and believed the party would maintain power into the future unless the GOP became more pluralistic. Again, frustrations from the Obama Era, in which the glaring problems of inequality and corruption were not answered, then helped turn the tide in quick order.

Waiting on MAGA supporters to just turn isn’t just a losing strategy, it’s an action, or inaction more specifically, that makes the possibility of an overtly Neo-Nazi turn in U.S. politics much, much more likely. The only answer is to begin expressing and carrying out solutions that answer the material conditions that underlay all of these shifts and changes.

We forget very often the true history of the rise of Nazism and Fascism. We’re told it was a phenomenon that sparked in Western Europe, but this obscures that these movements were inspired by American politics and law and that the U.S. had its own outbreak of fascism prior to World War II. With the Great Depression, sparked by similar policies and events as to what we have now, frustration and fear led to scores of Americans embracing both Nazism and Fascism, an outbreak that was only answered when Franklin D. Roosevelt promised to change the status quo and used the power of the government to invest in programs that would lower the temperature.

These historic lessons are essential if we are to get through this. Trump seems to be hellbent on wrecking the economy on behalf of his benefactors and setting off a crisis that will profit and empower them, and that prospect makes this analysis of the post-schism shift even more vital. People disillusioned by MAGA and taken advantage of by Trump and his cronies are going to become more and more angry as long as these things are not answered, and the pipeline has already been constructed to deliver them to more and more extreme ideas. We can avoid that outcome. We must avoid that outcome.

This schism isn’t a time to rest on our heels and hope for the best. It’s yet another landmark in this ongoing battle that should tell us that action is needed more than ever. We need to coalesce around ideas and movements dedicated to addressing these material conditions, ending the age of redistribution toward the ultra-rich, doing away with this awful austerity, and attempting, like we’ve seen in the past, to undercut the motivating factors that add to the already rampant hatred and fascistic energies.

Again, Trump is a symptom of a much larger disease. We’ve already discussed that even if he were to suddenly die, the current that rushed him into office would continue. Beyond Trump, and beyond MAGA, we could have the world we desire, the world we deserve, but leaving it to chance and hoping for the best simply will not get us there. It’s time we got to work and left magical thinking behind.