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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. If you haven't heard yet, the first criminal trial of Donald Trump will actually begin now in less than two weeks, and right here in New York. It's the so-called Stormy Daniels hush money case. Remember, the alleged crime is not paying the hush money itself. It wasn't a crime to pay the porn star to stop saying they had an affair. The alleged crime was falsifying business records to cover up the hush money payments during the 2016 presidential election.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is charging that Trump basically made an illegal campaign donation to himself by paying out that money but not reporting it as campaign spending. Instead, Trump arranged for his attorney, Michael Cohen, to write the checks to Stormy Daniels and Trump reimbursed Cohen as if for routine business expenses. That's the actual case.

Jury selection is scheduled to begin two weeks from yesterday, Monday, April 15th but there's now a case within the case that is arguably much more serious than allegedly hiding campaign spending. The judge in the case, Juan Merchan, felt compelled yesterday to expand a gag order on Trump to include verbal or printed attacks on family members of witnesses and justice system personnel because Trump had been attacking the judge's own daughter in social media posts and things for being connected with a company that helps Democrats win elections.

Judge Merchan wrote this in yesterday's order, "The average observer must now, after hearing defendants' recent attacks, draw the conclusion that if they become involved in these proceedings, even tangentially, they should worry not only for themselves but their loved ones. Such concerns will undoubtedly interfere with a fair administration of justice and constitutes a direct attack on the rule of law itself." From Judge Juan Merchan from the bench yesterday. Now, mind you, Trump is still allowed to publicly criticize Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, and he's allowed to criticize Judge Merchan himself, just not the judge's family members or family members of other legal system personnel.

We'll see if Trump defies those limits, which would land almost anyone else behind bars, but maybe not Donald Trump, who might be, as they say, too big to jail. There's even a larger question that all of this implies, and that's what we'll talk about now. If Trump does get back into office, will he end democracy and the rule of law as we know them? Would he not just verbally criticize people like Judge Merchan's daughter, but explicitly use his power over the justice system to imprison them? If you believe Trump in his own words, he will.

Donald Trump: If I happen to be president and I see somebody who's doing well and beating me very badly, I say, go down and indict them.

Brian Lehrer: Have you heard that one yet? That's one statement from Trump's own mouth causing concern about what kind of authoritarianism we might be in for. Here's another. These are all recent. I didn't write down the exact dates, but they're all in the context of the current campaign. This one from the fascist or Nazi, or call it what you want, playbook is to identify groups of people in the country and dehumanize them. In this case, explicitly call them, well, you'll hear.

Donald Trump: Young people that are in jail for years. If you call them people, I don't know if you call them people. In some cases, they're not people in my opinion, but I'm not allowed to say that because the radical left says that's a terrible thing to say.

Brian Lehrer: Calling them not people and he continues.

Donald Trump: These are animals. We have to stop it.

Brian Lehrer: March 16th in that case, both of those. There's that. Plus this similar one that you've no doubt heard before, but I think it didn't get enough attention for how sweeping it was when he referred to immigrants poisoning our blood. You've all heard about the poisoning our blood quote but listen carefully. He was talking about people from all over the world.

Donald Trump: When they let I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country when they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They're coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They're pouring into our country. Nobody's even looking at them. They just come in. The crime is going to be tremendous. The terrorism is going to be and we built a tremendous piece of the wall and then we're going to build more.

Brian Lehrer: I don't know if you ever heard that whole clip. A lot of news organizations just pulled out the little poisoning our blood and talked about it but you hear there how sweeping it is. You get the idea. It's jarring, right, to hear them played all close together like that. I was hesitant to even do it and I could go on with more, but I won't. What does this all add up to? What words should anyone use in good faith to describe how a second Trump term might transform America?

That's the subject of an article in the New Yorker by staff writer Andrew Marantz called Why We Can't Stop Arguing About Whether Trump Is a Fascist. It's actually a book review of a book called Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America. Let's discuss. Andrew Marantz is also author of his own book from 2019. He was on the show for it back then called Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. He joins us now. Hi, Andrew. Welcome back to WNYC.

Andrew Marantz: Thanks, Brian. I'm glad to be here as always.

Brian Lehrer: What's a fascist? Maybe a lot of people use the word loosely these days. Your article cites at least two people's definitions. What's a fascist?

Andrew Marantz: What's a fascist is the subject of this book and many other books. It's on one level, a semantic distinction and on another level, a pretty deep sort of meta debate. There is a kind of classic set of definitions. The word was originally associated with Mussolini in the 1910s and 1920s in Italy. The original etymological metaphor was of the fascist, a bunch of sticks being bound together. Right from the beginning, you have, it's almost literally a bundle of contradictions in the metaphor. Mussolini used some far left rhetoric. He used some far right rhetoric.

He used some I'm just a pragmatist. I just want to get the trains running on time rhetoric. It's not an accent that we're confused today about is Donald Trump a fascist because he's so contradictory. Sometimes he'll say isolationist things like, "I want to get us out of wars." Then other times he'll say really warlike things. Sometimes he sounds like a normal Republican where he just wants pro-life judges and tax cuts. Then other times he sounds completely abnormal like in those clips you were playing. There's been this debate ever since he came down the golden escalator in 2015, should we call this fascism?

On some level, and I'm sure we'll get to this, it can kind of feel like a distraction. There's certainly a camp of people who would say, "Who cares what we call him as long as we recognize that he's really dangerous and abnormal." I think part of what's important beyond the semantics of the debate is in what way should we expect him to be abnormal or what are we worried about normalizing? There's a camp that says that if we call him a fascist, we're making him almost too special or imbuing him with too much power and there's an opposing side of that argument. To get to your original question, fascism is itself a bundle of contradictions, as Umberto Eco called it, who lived through the original fascism. It's no wonder that we're confused because it's always been confusing.

Brian Lehrer: Go further into what you were just starting to say about whether this isn't a distraction or, I would ask, an academic exercise. Why is there even a book to review? That was the context here. You were reviewing a book in The New Yorker, a book called Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America but it's not like a hundred years of fascism in America. It's about how should we think about Donald Trump? There's a book to review that presents multiple essays on whether Trump is a fascist, cites mostly academics. Why is this more than an academic exercise?

Andrew Marantz: Yes, right. It is mostly scholars and some journalists. It is more than academic. I should even say that it's a narrow band. This is not Trump apologists versus Trump critics. Everyone in this book starts from the premise that Trump needs to be severely criticized. Trump is very bad news. Trump is dangerous in multiple ways for the country. You don't go through this book and try to decide whether Trump is bad or not. This is all a debate about in what specific ways should we categorize the badness of Trump? One of the axis of that debate is how unique is this? Have we faced anything like this in America before? There is this strand of American exceptionalism that is typified by the phrase made famous by Sinclair Lewis, it can't happen here. That's what the book is playing on. This notion that fascism is only a European thing, it's not something that can happen here. There's long been a counterargument to that going back to W. E. B. Du Bois and a strain of African-American scholarship saying that what was the end of reconstruction and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, if not a proto-fascist movement? These are people wearing matching uniforms, using extra-legal violence to get their way, and having massive influence on the federal government.

You can take that line of logic to things like January 6th, where you have some people saying, "This can't be fascist because it wasn't a successful coup. It didn't result in the overturning of the government." Then you have other people saying, "No, this does fit the definition." I don't want to give the entire technical scholarly definition because it involves many, many sub-clauses, but you can take one example is political elites coordinating with committed nationalist militants.

Some people would look at something like take the clan in the post-reconstruction era or take January 6th if you want and some people would look at that and say these are elites like Woodrow Wilson or Donald Trump collaborating with nationalist militants who are using violence. Other people would say, "Well, but they didn't actually infiltrate the government. They didn't actually stop the election from being certified and so it's not really fascist because it doesn't have state power. It doesn't have control over the military and the generals and all those things."

Brian Lehrer: That's what they were trying to do, have state power if Pence had stopped the certification of the election and all of that. They came relatively close to using state power to transform the nature of the state. One of the key questions you explore in the book review is how much to even consider Trump an aberration as opposed to a continuation of how America created Trump over many years. That to me might even be more of an interesting question than whether to call Trump a fascist versus an authoritarian versus something else. Why is that an important distinction that comes up, whether Trump should be seen as an aberration or a continuation?

Andrew Marantz: This is another way of answering your last question of why is this more than an academic debate. Part of it is just pragmatically speaking, what do these words allow us to predict? What predictive power do they have? When you see words like authoritarian fascist, and then you see a lot of qualifications, proto-fascist, semi-fascist, fascist-ish and they can sound silly or hair splitty but actually where I end up in my essay is being most sympathetic to those or to another one that's called authoritarian populism. Basically what they all allow you to do is to try to predict with a little bit more specificity what might happen next. If you just say, "Well, this is totally normal business as usual," then you might be caught off guard when something like January 6th happens because that's not something that has happened before.

On a very basic level, how you frame this within the historical context allows you to look forward and have at least a range of possibilities for what might happen next. In a way, I think that cuts both ways in the fascism debate. You could say we should be more inclined to see this as fascism or semi-fascism because it allows us a broader purview of imagination to see the weird things that could happen next, the scary things that could happen next. There could be a totally militarized border, there could be drone surveillance all over. All these things that seem out of the realm of possibility, once you say, "Well, if this is a potentially fascist regime, they no longer seem completely out of the realm of possibility."

On the other hand, if by fascism, we only can imagine the armbands and brown and black shirts and tanks in the streets, these prototypical images from 1930s Europe in a way that impoverishes our imagination because many of the scholars in the book who I'm most sympathetic to make the point, I think very persuasively, that if we're worried about it happening here in the 21st century, the it that we're referring to will have morphed and evolved and it won't look exactly like it did in the '30s because things change and authoritarian leaders learn from the authoritarians of the past, and they evolve and they improve.

Again, in terms of taking it out of the realm of academics and semantics, if we want to look forward and try to think about what's going to happen, we want to expand the possibilities and the scopes of what we want to consider, but then we don't want to be married to these almost archetypes in our mind of what has happened in the past. It's an echo, not a repeating thing.

Brian Lehrer: Echo not repeating, but not just of Mussolini or Hitler, but things in American history. That's the continuum versus the aberration in the US context argument. This even goes so far as to some of the history that's been documented of how Hitler got some of his ideas from watching the United States. That concept as you refer to in your article, was in the book Hitler's American Model by James Q. Whitman. It was also in the Ken Burns documentary on America and the Holocaust for people who saw that. The KKK comes up in this respect in your article as a homemade proto-fascist movement in this country. That could be seen as a continuum, and we know how much actual harm the KKK did.

Andrew Marantz: Oh, absolutely. There's been a lot written about the Nazis in the early '30s trying to say, "Okay, well, can we really have something like a one-drop rule?" They look for precedent to various American states and say, "Well, they do it there, I guess we could do it here." The contention is not that the Nazis never would've come up with this stuff if the US hadn't existed, but that there was a mutual emboldening of the far right in both countries. All that, I think what we can see from that is that the notion that it can't happen here was never actually meant to be taken seriously. That book title was a satire, that book was a satire. We weren't meant to take away it actually can't happen here.

There are structural differences, of course. We have a two-party system, not a parliamentary system. We have an extremely difficult to amend constitution. There are structural differences that are important to take into consideration and a lot of the people who say that the fascism label is not the best label will point to the differences. The huge levels of economic depression and inflation after World War 1. You can run down the list of differences. I think though, as you said, the whole point of whether we emphasize the differences or emphasize the continuities, there are both. These analogies are not equivalences. No one thinks Trump is actually literally Hitler and no one thinks Trump is totally normal and does everything the way every previous politician did.

Part of what I was moved to write about was that there's a bit of caricaturing that happens in this argument where people want to see the other side as complete hair on fire alarmists or just delusional quietist. I don't think that's really how anybody sees it. I think the question is of emphasis. What are you more worried about normalizing? Are you more worried about normalizing what the Trumpism movement is doing now or are you more worried about normalizing all the structural problems, inequality, we could go down the list, all the problems that led to Trumpism in the first place?

Depending on what you're strategically more worried about normalizing, it'll lead you to emphasize either the continuities or the discontinuities. One way of putting it is if you're so worried that people will take Trump as a scapegoat and say, "The only problem we have is Donald Trump, and if we could just jail him or impeach him or get rid of him everything will be fine again and all of our sins will be carried away by him," that's obviously not true. I think that nobody puts it that way explicitly, but there's a kind of undercurrent of that hope. There's a libidinal wish almost that if we could just get rid of this one vulgar or problematic guy, everything could be okay again. If you're really worried about that tendency, then you would want to emphasize the continuities. This isn't completely new. This didn't come out of nowhere. We've seen this before.

Brian Lehrer: I want to put that question out to the listeners among other questions related to what we've been discussing. Some people are calling in already and some are texting, so I want to make sure everybody has the phone number. Listeners, do you call Trump a fascist, an authoritarian, something else? Do you think it matters? 212-433-WNYC. More importantly, I think, do you see Trump as a continuation, or do you see Trump as an aberration in the context of American history? 212-433-9692. Here's the one I was just referring to, picking up on the end of Andrew's last answer. What do you think will happen if Trump loses, folks? If he loses, what do we go back to? If he wins, what needs to be done to stop the worst of his impulses, whether you call it fascism, or authoritarianism, or populism, or something else? What if he loses? What do you think we go back to? What do you think the Republican party goes back to if it goes back at all? You can engage on any of those questions.

As everybody's already doing, all our lines are full, you can call in when people finish up. That's the way it goes. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692 call or text. You can always text. That doesn't fill up. My guest if you're just joining us and wondering who prompted this conversation is New Yorker staff writer, Andrew Marantz who has an article called Why We Can't Stop Arguing About Whether Trump is a Fascist? It's actually a book review of a book called Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America. We're going to come back and take up that scenario of what if Trump loses, and take some of your calls and texts right after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we talk about Trump and fascism. Remember this one?

Donald Trump: Nobody knows the system better than me. Which is why I alone can fix it.

Brian Lehrer: I alone can fix it, a kind of fascist reference. That was from the 2016 Republican convention as we continue with New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz, who has an article called Why We Can't Stop Arguing About Whether Trump is a Fascist? Again, it's actually a book review of a new book called Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America.

Andrew, before we go to some calls, that one from 2016, it's so sort of quintessential Trump in that he's doing it with a wink so that his apologists can say, "Well, he's talking about how he was a creature of the system, how he knew how to work the system, and maybe even abused the system because he was so smart, he was so clever." Remember, he boasted about avoiding taxes as much as he could. Then he gets to "I alone can fix it", and that's the pure fascist part. That was pure, classic multilayer Trump, right?

Andrew Marantz: Absolutely, yes. Whether this is all pre-planned or instinctive, this is something that he has been very skilled at from the beginning, that plausible deniability. Again, if we want to do the fascist analogies, we can go back to the contemporaneous newspaper coverage of Mussolini and Hitler and see this whole debate at the time of are they mere buffoons who have no idea what they're doing or are they masterminds plotting this all out in advance?

Again, that's just one place where you can see how broadening your palette of comparisons is helpful. If you only have Mussolini and Hitler to compare to, then you run out of comparisons very quickly. Is he like Hitler in this way or unlike Hitler in this way? If you can compare to authoritarian populace abroad today, if you can compare it to Narendra Modi in India, or Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or on and on down that list, Erdoğan in Turkey, then you can expand your horizon of things to look out for and you can expand, again, your diagnostic or prescriptive capability.

Brian Lehrer: I think to that point, our first caller, who we're going to take here, Helen in Brooklyn, wants to expand the definition to a country from the mid-20th century that we haven't even mentioned yet. Helen, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Helen: Thank you for having this show, Brian. Franco of Spain. He was a fascist, and if any ran a fascist regime once he smashed the republic because he got plenty of aid from Germany and the other side did not get any aid from us. He was that expansionist. He was not interested in spreading Spanish fascism abroad, he was merely interested in running his country. In fact, I think there was less antisemitism there than in Germany, certainly, and even in Italy.

He just destroyed as many political people as he wanted to and he was a fascist. As a matter of fact, in the history of fascism at that time, I learned that almost every country in Europe had a fascist party. It only succeeded in Germany and Italy, and for particular reasons, but there was a fascist tendency everywhere. America is no different than any other country. It's had, as you already mentioned, its own long history of proto-fascist movements that never reached full let's say power.

Brian Lehrer: Helen, thank you very much for that perspective. Did Franco come up in the book that you reviewed, Andrew?

Andrew Marantz: Absolutely. You make a couple of really great points. One is, Franco is a really great example of someone who is a non-expansionist who we would now consider to be a fascist, but at the time, there were debates, just like there are debates now, should we consider Franco a species of fascism. Should we consider Japanese fascism to be fascism? After all, they have an emperor, they have a whole different tradition way of doing things. This is a really important point I think because it'll always be a bundle, again, a checklist, where you have to use your own subjective analysis to say, "Okay, Franco fits the bill in terms of the uniforms and the Christian nationalism, and the 'I alone can solve the problems'." He does not in terms of an expansionist war policy, and so you have to make a judgment.

Part of what this collection-- Actually, the Orwell is not in this collection. This collection goes back to Hannah Arendt and a bunch of classic texts, Umberto Eco, as I mentioned. Orwell is not in here, but Orwell was taking up this question precisely of, "Is Franco a fascist." He said, "Well, the word has been so stretched that it almost has no meaning." This is Orwell writing in the '40s, saying the word fascism is so abused, that everyone just uses it as a term of insult to an epithet against whatever they dislike.

On the other hand, it would be absurd to say since we can't specifically technically define fascism in every instance, we therefore can't fight against it. Orwell was alive to exactly the thing this caller is bringing up which is there are differences and it's important to admit the differences, but it doesn't mean that you have to therefore be a quietest or a nihilist and say, "Well, there's nothing we can do about any of it."

Brian, to your point about the American historical through line to all of this, there were very so-called mainstream conservatives who were very admiring of the Franco regime. Brent Bozell, who was William F. Buckley's roommate at Yale, was a big Francophile, that kind of Francophile. France is another example that had a failed, but nearly successful fascist movement. We can learn a lot from that, too, that a party or a movement can be fascist without winning all of its objectives, but it can win enough of its objectives that we can see what its intentions are and see how much support it gets. Of course, as the caller said, there were fascist parties everywhere, including here, and they got a fair amount of support. I think these are all good points. It's exactly what we were saying about expanding beyond just two examples.

Brian Lehrer: Helen's call took the question head-on, should we be calling Trump a fascist? Our next caller, Ann in Chatham, New Jersey, takes on one of the other questions in the article that we touched on, which is how alarmed to be as opposed to, what do you have, the alarmists versus the deflationists. Was that it?

Andrew Marantz: Yes, exactly.

Brian Lehrer: In terms of how much the system can survive a Donald Trump. Ann in Chatham, New Jersey wants to take that one on I think. Ann, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Ann: Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I'm at the point where I'm tired of just shrugging my shoulders and just saying, "Oh, well, I'm a fan of late night television, the comedians do a great job, but we're talking about the President of the United States, the former President of the United States." I'm tired of the violence that he promotes. I can't just shrug my shoulders anymore. It's too close to history and we cannot repeat some of the things that he is promoting. We just can't. I don't know what to do.

Brian Lehrer: What do you most fear would actually happen?

Ann: He does have so much support and I'm just afraid that our country will not uphold the principles of the Democratic free world. I'm afraid.

Brian Lehrer: Ann, thank you very much. I'm just going to go right onto to another caller, Vic on the Upper West side, who I think is going to bring up an important question that's an underlying question about even having this conversation. Vic, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Vic: Good morning. Trump continues to outrage. This past weekend, Trump dominated the political news overwhelmingly, not the President of the United States. It appears that the media are making the same mistake that they made in 2016 that is giving Trump way too much airtime and ink. What does Mr. Marantz think?

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Vic. I'll say I've talked about this before, but it's a question we struggle with all the time, and we try to find the right balance. We can fall off on the side of ignoring the threat too much when Trump says all these things and they indicate what kind of a fascist he might potentially be if he gets into office again versus giving more oxygen and playing into his hands because this is exactly what he wants and everybody's going to say, "Oh, this is so outrageous," but for all the people that reject him because of those things, he's going to find new people who embrace him because of those things. Andrew, do you have that discussion in the New Yorker newsroom?

Andrew Marantz: For sure. This is an ongoing, I think not entirely solvable dilemma. I wrote in the book you mentioned earlier, Brian, Anti-Social, I wrote about how online trolls put us in this insoluble trap. Obviously Donald Trump is a troll through and through. You're put in this impossible bind where if you don't denounce and call out the unconscionable thing that the troll is saying, then you seem to be complicit or silently condoning, or even worse, you seem unable to come up with a counter argument.

Yet if you do respond in any way, you're giving them oxygen and you're falling into the trap of don't feed the trolls. You see this with Donald Trump. We've seen it again since 2015. I think just on the pragmatic point, I've seen it argued both ways that if only the media would stop giving him oxygen, his support would deflate and he would go away. I've also seen the argument that as soon as the media starts doing its job and covering how corrupt and how buffoonish and how terrible he is, then his support will go away.

I don't see that happening either way. I think when all the networks take all of his rallies live, his support doesn't go away. When they ignore him, he doesn't go away. The Biden campaign has been saying all along that as soon as voters remember who Donald Trump is and how much they dislike him, Biden's poll numbers will go up. It seems like they are banking on Trump getting more media attention and that leading to his unpopularity rising. I don't think we actually know as an empirical matter which thing would or wouldn't make him go away.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, why do you think the book, one book can't do everything, but the book you're reviewing in your essay called Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America, why is it only concerned with the label fascist and not Nazi? In Nazi Germany language, like we played in the Trump clips earlier saying the hated groups are animals and not people, and poisoning our blood and rousing supporters to a bloodbath like he did the other day, that did actually lead to the Holocaust. Why the fascism debate to the exclusion if it is to the exclusion of the Nazism debate?

Andrew Marantz: I don't think it's to the exclusion. I think that generally the scholars in the book would take Nazism to be a kind of fascism. The question-- I should be clear that this whole debate, this book and the meta debate around it, it's not just about Donald Trump as a person because you can get in a bit of a miasma where you say, "Well, does he really mean it? What does he really mean? How does his brain work?" Nobody knows. Nobody knows that.

It's a bit of a distraction because I think to something we were talking about earlier, Donald Trump will go away eventually. At some point it will happen. There's again, another diagnostic question of what happens after that and how degraded have our democratic institutions become in the meantime, or were they already that degraded and he just brought it into sharper focus?

I think that with the Nazism versus fascism thing, that is taken into account, but my sense is that people don't want to only hark on what is the worst possible thing because for many reasons, but one being that if anything short of the worst possible thing happens, then you can take that as a reductio and say, "Well see, there wasn't-

Brian Lehrer: It didn't happen.

Andrew Marantz: -total termination, so it didn't happen."

Brian Lehrer: One listener texts, "The problem with Trump is all the threatened violence that makes it fascist and especially when his supporters say he didn't make specific threats. That also makes it like the mafia." To the question you were just raising about what happens when he goes away, listener writes, "Be alarmed, be very alarmed. If he goes, there will be plenty of others already in place to take his place as a fascist authoritarian leader. Just look in the Senate at some of the authoritarians already working and the House of Representatives."

I think it doesn't come up in the book, at least it doesn't come up in your review of the book that I saw. If Trump loses, and let's say he loses and he does go away more or less, how much does the Republican party just give us the next Trump with most of the same trappings in a Josh Hawley or a Tom Cotton or a JD Vance?

Andrew Marantz: This is I think where it's useful to look at contemporary 21st century equivalents. There are some places-- I write about Hungary where Victor Orban in his first term as Prime Minister, he did relatively normal post Cold War liberal stuff. Then he went away and he lost, and he didn't actively contest that election. Then when he came back, he started very clinically patiently using very adroitly I would add, much more patiently and clinically than we've ever seen Donald Trump do showing the ability to dismantle the Hungarian state as it existed.

That's a model where you don't see the worst of it in the first term or even the second term. It evolves over time. Now, again, we have term limits, we have a two party system. A lot of things are different here, but I guess you can see there's a term in the democratic backsliding literature called partisan degradation where the problem is not just one person. The problem is an entire party that is willing to cut corners in ways that they haven't before.

That they'll not allow the opposition party to vote on a Supreme Court justice and they'll install one of their own instead. We have seen things like that, and this is where in the essay I express a lot of sympathy for alarmism. I think alarmism gets a bad rap, and I think it's important to be alert to multiple possibilities. I guess where I think the deflationists or the anti-alarmists are making an important contribution is that I think we should also be honest about the ways that Trump has been forwarded.

He was not able to overturn the election. He did not institute martial law during COVID, which according to the fascist playbook would've been a perfect time for him to do that. He, a lot of times feels like a floundering Fox News guest who when he was in the White House would tweet or whine or go on Fox News and say what he wanted, but he wasn't able to marshal the actual statecraft and consistent ability to do so.

Will there be a future Trump after Trump who can do that? I think that's worth thinking about, and I think that's worth thinking through what the actual mechanisms would be, and not just pure dystopic, nightmare fiction. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but trying to think through mechanistically what would a more capable person in that seat do and what can we do to stop it? Also, to what extent is that completely discontinuous with our history? I think a deeper question here is if we take seriously the Klan analogy, the Woodrow Wilson analogy, all the precursors that we've seen within American politics, the 2000 election was a very dirty, contested election and I think a lot of people look back at what happened in Florida with the Brooks Brothers riot and see glimmers of January 6th in that. If we take that seriously, I think it then becomes more incumbent on us to think deeply about changing our system beyond just a single person.

Brian Lehrer: There we leave it at least for today with New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz. His article is called Why We Can't Stop Arguing About Whether Trump is a Fascist. It's actually a book review of a new book called Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives On Fascism and America. Andrew, always good to talk.

Andrew Marantz: Thank you so much, Brian.

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