MAGA seems to dismiss certain verbal attacks on them by the libs as not just hot air, but they ignore and sometimes even embrace what others call slurs and insults like the words fascists and dictators. The most stunning recent development has been the millions participating in peaceful marches under the banner of "No Kings", a polite way of calling Trump a wannabe dictator who is destroying the democracy we have had for 250 years. Trump just brushed that off before the entire world by not being offended by being called a dictator, but embracing it in Davos with "sometimes you need a dictator.. There is evidence that many in the MAGA movement agree, given CPAC and the implementing documents of Project 2025 and actions unfolding before our very eyes on amateur and professional videos. They are either silent or in denial.
Is it time to call Trump a fascist kind of dictator? Dictators are not confined to specific ideologies. They can just as easily be communists as those on the farthest right. A recent case was made in the Atlantic that it was time to call Trump a fascist, despite the negative reaction it would inflame. My answer is to call specific actions the same as what fascists once did, instead of calling people or a group fascists. Fascist is still an insulting label, and hurling insults never was a good way to make friends and influence people. Yes, there are those within the MAGA movement who are there for reasons other than ideology or hero worship, are fearful, or have political and business ambitions. who would not like to be called fascists. Applebaum at the Atlantic, Maddow at MSNOW, and a bevy of historians and political scientists have doing a yeoman's job in educating what fascists in the last century did, but there needs to be more explicit linking the specific act to being similar to fascism, similar to what the fascists once did.
The implicit message is, if you do not want to be called a fascist, then do not act like one.
There is plenty of evidence that some in MAGA have already decided it would take a dictator to accomplish what they want to happen. What they want to happen sums it up in Make America Again, back to an era that resembles the 1950's, I suspect, though the "again" is never dated by MAGA interviewees, but resembles their attitudes that look like before the civil rights legislation and DEI. As evidence, CPAC(the conservative political action committee) began holding meetings in Hungary, whose dictator, Viktor Orbán, epitomized the kind of strong leadership that was their ideal. If that was not enough of a clue of what kind of America MAGA wanted to have govern us, they gave us another clue: Project 2025, which was a publicly printed blueprint of how to remove the checks and balances that kept a King, a tyrant, a despot, a dictator from becmiing "president", and used the placid term: unitary government. It would make the "president" be both the legislative and judicial branches, by subjugating those branches to his/her power. In his second term, the writers of that document were put in key positions to carry out the methods of achieving Project 2025 to replace all decision-making positions, civil service protected, and appointee positions with appointees who were screened to ideological loyalty to the White Nationalist agenda. It was done under the banner of getting rid of the deep state. Laced throughout that document was the destruction of DEI in all matters. Trump appointed the Project 2025 architect as the person in charge of personnel and then proceeded to use the DOJ to threaten and to prosecute those who put up resistance or who did not resign. Their weapon and tool was Donald Trump, who seems to have never enough absolute power to suit his appetite, even after his appointees on the Supreme Court gifted him immunity from criminal prosecution. Trump himself touted his lack of moral standards (he'll use his own version of what is moral, he told Davos) "transactional.. another polite term that means right is whatever favors him and his advantage and power, which he believes, and said so, in a recent interview that he has the power to do whatever he wants.
The other element in the MAGA equation, not openly expressed because there is still an element of political correctness, is, in my opinion, the belief that white people were superior to those of other colors and races, and they deserved to be the ones governing the country. The evidence is that they support a president whose racism ranges from calling brown migrants, legal or not, those who are "poisoning the blood of our country", sometimes referring to them bringing diseases", or who mostly were rapists and murderers as he descdended his golden escalator, and then to even call neo Nazis some fine people in the Charlottesville demonstrations. . MAGA's silence when being called racists or supporters of the white race is as good as consent. They are supportive, or silent, of ICE targeting only those of color for their drag net, a racial profiling, mass deportation policy that not only got the murderers and rapists, but also deported far more who were only guilty of a misdemeanor by not having documents showing legal status. Even some who flashed proof of birth, passports, green cards, said they were citizens, were caught and sent to detention camps if they looked or had accents like migrants.
What has unnerved the MAGAs is that millions of white, middle-class people objected to the tactics of ICE by marching in every big city and red and blue hamlets in America. They do not share the MAGA values. What word the citizens of Minneapolis coined was to call migrants of color their neighbors, in the spirit of the words spoken by Christ or some other moral standards. They backed up their attitudes by helping those afraid to be snatched by ICE agents in danger because of their color, accent or language, even if they had proof of legal status.
The final straw that may put a dent in MAGA itself (maybe) or further inspired more protesters (for sure) was the suppression of white protesters whistling, shouting slurs, and videoing ICE take down atrocities and the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, white, middle-class protesters. Calling them immediately "domestic terrorists" has been a hard sell to most Americans as videos and backgrounds became more known and reported in more media. The "don't believe your very eyes" is the MAGA response that is wearing thin. Now, the arrest and prosecution of journalists like Don Lemon is a further attempt to suppress inconvenient revelations to the world of ICE's inhumane and unconstitutional tactics. Trump has always called journalists the enemy of the people (meaning him?). The truths they reveal are not always convenient.
For those of us who have had personal experiences with both communist dictators and fascist dictators and/or who remember history lessons of the 1930s, or knew refugees from fascist Latin American dictators, the term describing how history is repeating itself, using the word fascism, is appropriate. What the Trumpists are doing is similar to what those we called fascists in the previous century also did. Calling a person or a group of people fascist is still too inflammatory, but accusing them of acting like one in specific ways has historical validity.
My response as a political opinion writer/journalist is to call whatever actions are the same employed by fascists and dictators in the recent past, as that. It is when the tactics and actions are the same used by these villains of the past, we should call out those acts as fascist. Such acts are what we once called evil.
MUFTIC FORUM BLOG: My nagging question: why does fascism keep raising its ugly
Yes, It’s Fascism - The Atlantic
Comments attributed to Trump:
Sometimes we need a dictator: it is common sense President Trump at the World Economic Forum: “Sometimes you need a dictator.” #news #trump
July 23, 2019: At a Turning Point USA summit,, "Then I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president." He made this claim while criticizing the Mueller investigation.
- August 2025: During a White House Cabinet meeting in his second term, when asked about potentially using the military domestically, he asserted, "I have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States".
- January 2026: In a New York Times interview, he refined this idea by stating that international law does not limit him, only his "own morality" and "own mind"
- October 2023: In an interview with The National Pulse, Trump stated: "It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have".
- December 2023: At a campaign rally in Durham, New Hampshire, he repeated the claim, telling supporters that migrants from Africa, Asia, and South America are "poisoning the blood of our country".
- December 2023: During a later rally in Waterloo, Iowa, he doubled down on the rhetoric, alleging without evidence that migrants bring "crime and potentially disease with them".
- Truth Social Posts: Trump also used all-caps posts on Truth Social to assert that "illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation".
- Sources above Google AI
