The Road Trump Is Treading

Dehumanization doesn’t begin with violence; it starts with erasing rights and identities, one policy at a time.

Trump’s authoritarian project isn’t classical 20th-century fascism. He is not Adolf Hitler, and he doesn’t fit the traditional mold of a fascist. But that offers little comfort. He is treading a path that echoes some of the darkest chapters in history. Authoritarianism doesn’t start with tanks. It starts with whom we stop protecting.

The tactics are unmistakable.

He scapegoats and demonizes, casting immigrants, minorities, and dissenters not just as adversaries, but as existential threats. He glorifies violence, encouraging assaults on opponents, offering pardons to the loyal, normalizing brutality in the service of power.

He demands personal loyalty — not to laws, not to institutions, but to himself — positioning his survival as synonymous with the nation’s. He delegitimizes elections, rejecting any result that denies him victory, corroding trust in the peaceful transfer of power.

He weaponizes the state, turning law enforcement against critics while dismantling the independence of courts, health agencies, and watchdogs.

He floods the public square with lies and conspiracies, not to convince but to confuse — to exhaust resistance itself.

He demonizes the press, branding it “the enemy of the people,” while elevating loyalists into organs of propaganda.

He encourages the militarization of civilian life, praising vigilantes and blurring the line between protest and paramilitary action. He normalizes corruption, redefining public office as an instrument of personal gain and vendetta.

He wraps it all in apocalyptic nationalism, warning of collapse unless loyalty to him is absolute, and dressing it in the mythology of a lost, purified past.

Anthropologists have long seen the pattern: when societies reel from dislocation, loss, and fear, they often respond not with solidarity, but with division. People search for scapegoats to blame and strongmen to punish them. Belonging becomes defined not by shared hope, but by shared enemies. Cruelty becomes a form of identity. And slowly, societies forget how to see those outside the shrinking circle of “us” as human at all.

Trumpism is not classical fascism. Fascism built vast machinery of control, fusing state, army, and ideology into a single force. Trump’s movement is messier, more opportunistic. It doesn’t aim to fully mobilize the state — it seeks to hollow it out, turning government into a personal weapon while outsourcing violence and intimidation to private actors.

It replaces ideological rigor with grievance, spectacle, and conspiracy.

But if the form has changed, the function — the normalization of cruelty, the erosion of law, the cult of loyalty — remains eerily the same. The echoes are too loud to ignore.

And now, the crackdown on undocumented immigrants sharpens the warning.

Stripping their names from Social Security rolls — erasing them administratively, as if already dead. Denying them access to the most basic due process protections. Threatening to criminalize acts of compassion. Proposing to exile them to brutal foreign prisons beyond the reach of American law. Turning human beings into legal phantoms — visible only as threats, invisible as persons.

Throughout history, the first move of rising authoritarian regimes has been to redraw the boundaries of who is protected by law — and who is not. Citizenship, rights, even the presumption of humanity are redefined as privileges to be granted or denied. And once a group falls outside that circle, cruelty no longer shocks the conscience. It becomes routine.

This isn’t just cruelty. It’s the methodical dismantling of legal personhood — the very first step toward far darker outcomes.

The Nazis did not start with death camps. They started with paperwork. They started with redefining who mattered — and who could be forgotten. We are not living in 1941 Germany. But the logic that made 1941 possible is taking root here and now.

This is how it happens: Not with a single catastrophe, but with a slow normalization of cruelty. Not with mass arrests overnight, but with a thousand quiet erasures no one stops.

Trump is not a fascist. But he is normalizing the tactics of fascism. And if we fail to recognize the road while we still have time, we may find ourselves powerless to turn back.

The architecture of dehumanization is already rising around us. The question is whether we have the courage to dismantle it before it is too late.

Suggested Readings:

Applebaum, Anne. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York: Doubleday, 2020.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Penguin Classics, 2017.

Livingstone Smith, David. Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others.New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011.

Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House, 2018.

Stanton, Gregory H. “The Eight Stages of Genocide.” Genocide Watch, 1996. https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages.