Trump’s Arlington Photoshoot Shows That Fascism is Here

MAGA already has a functional system of authoritarian terror.

When you say that we are facing a fascist takeover of the United States, you often get pushback. One common talking point is that, if we were actually in the middle of a fascist takeover, you wouldn’t be able to say so.

There are various reasons this is silly. First, and most obviously, in any fascist takeover, there is some moment where the fascists are planning to take over but haven’t managed it yet. Warning of a fascist takeover at that point is still possible. Necessary even.

But perhaps more to the point, we are actually at the point where fascists are silencing people. People in the US currently refuse to speak against Trump and fascism because they are afraid that Trump and his gutter fascists will harm them if they oppose him.

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Fascist vigilante harassment chills resistance

This week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump oozed orangely into Arlington National Cemetary to take a picture of himself standing over veteran’s graves with an oleaginous smile and a big thumb’s up.

You may think this is tasteless. And you’d be correct. It’s also illegal. It’s against federal law to campaign in Army National Military Cemeteries.

An Arlington official attempted to enforce the rules, and told Trump he couldn’t take his grotesque pictures there. Trump campaign thugs then verbally abused the official and pushed them. When the official filed an incident report, the Trump campaign issued a statement insulting them and claiming they were mentally ill.

The official decided not to press charges, because they were afraid that if they did, they would be targeted, harassed, and worse by Trump supporters, according to the New York Times.

Again, an Arlington official, doing their job, tried to enforce rules that are supposed to apply to all. They were roughed up and insulted. And they are afraid to stand up to Trump and his campaign because they know that if their opposition to Trump becomes public, their life will be destroyed.

This isn’t an idle fear. Trump has sicced his fascist dittohead minions on election workers whose only crime was refusing to throw the election for Donald Trump. They were doxed and harassed at their home, and one had to go into hiding. Trump also organized a violent coup, in which his supporters attacked the capital building, terrorizing representatives and workers, and five people died. News organization have found a list of incidents in which Trump supporters committed violence explicitly in his name.

Standing up to Trump is frightening. If he singles you out, his supporters will try to hurt you and your loved ones.

Trump and his campaign flaks are quite aware of this dynamic, and they use it to their advantage. The campaign said it could release video backing up its version of events. It hasn’t done so, probably because the video shows that the Arlington worker was in the right. But if the video shows the Arlington worker’s face, that worker will be tracked down by Trump supporters. “We have video” isn’t evidence; it’s a threat.

And Trump’s threats, implied and otherwise, worked. The official was scared to challenge the leader of a fascist movement for fear of fascist abuse.

The press is intimidated too

It’s not just regular government workers who fear Trump reprisals. There’s reasons to think media does as well.

Trump during his first term regularly railed against the press for criticizing him, or just reporting on him. He’s promised to do worse in his second term, openly discussing ways to investigate Comcast and NBCU News Group.

There’s circumstantial evidence that Trump’s rumblings have affected media coverage. Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, one of Trump’s main targets during his first term, sacked prize-winning WaPo editor Sally Buzbee and replaced her with scandal-plagued right-wing shithead and Murdoch hack William Lewis. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in the news this week assuring Republicans in Congress that he regrets having fact-checked and deboosted COVID disinformation and right-wing attacks on Democratic president Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

Maybe Bezos and Zuckerberg are just engaged in a nonpartisan pursuit of truth; maybe they never think about the effect fascist Trump flunkies at the Justice Department or FTC might have on their bottom line. Or, maybe, Bezos and Zuckerberg have, like the employee at Arlington, been intimidated.

As I’ve already mentioned, authoritarianism doesn’t necessarily happen all at once. And as it becomes entrenched, it can be hard to tell how exactly it is affecting people. Are the Washington Post fact checkers just dim bulbs bamboozled by their own both sides bullshit? Or are they being nudged from on high to delegitimize Democrats in hopes that Trump will be nice to the paper if he gets into office?

We can’t know. But we do know that people like the Arlington worker are (understandably) afraid to stand up to Trump. As Timothy Snyder has pointed out, authoritarianism depends in part on people obeying in advance; fascists create an environment of terror and fear so that people rush to cater to them before they enforce their edicts. Or even before they come into power.

Trump and the worst of America

Of course, Trump is not the first or only American leader to use threats of state violence to try to silence dissent. We are currently in the middle of an ugly bipartisan moral panic over student demonstrations, in which both parties have called for police to suppress peaceful protestors. Georgia officials (and again, not just Republicans) have unleashed a wave of repression against protestors against the construction of a police training facility. Go back further and there are multiple Red Scares, the long history of state assaults on Black speech and Black voting rights, and on and on.

Authoritarian repression is a part of America’s past and America’s present. US democracy has often been honored in the breach. But that’s not a reason to downplay Trump’s dangerous escalation. It’s a reason to recognize that it can in fact happen here, not least because it has been happening here for a long time.

Trump’s assault on democratic values is most frightening because he’s got a talent for weaponizing America’s worst traditions and worst impulses. IN this case, he’s taken the excessive deference accorded to ex-Presidents and presidential candidates, and used it to terrorize a government employee.

Trump’s thuggish eagerness to use his power and cult following to intimidate anyone who dares to balk him in any way is ominous because it tells us what a second Trump term would look like. It’s even more ominous, though, because in many ways it suggests that Trump’s first term didn’t really end. He is still, in many ways, in power. We may not be living under fascism writ large. But that Arlington employee understands all too well that wherever Trump goes, fascism is there.