On February 18, 2025, a video appeared on X. An officer from Enforcement and Removal Operations can be seen patting someone down before their deportation flight.  The sky over the Seattle airport is overcast. Jet engines can be heard idling in the background.

Then: the clinking of chains. We see a blue plastic crate, filled with metal restraints. Someone lays them out on the tarmac—one set of cuffs per person. People are cuffed tightly, hands and feet. The camera shows no faces, only bodies and steel. The video ends with a shackled prisoner climbing the boarding stairs with difficulty, his restraints hitting against the metal steps.

The title of the post: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight 🔊”. The abbreviation is a jarring reference to the type of YouTube video that soothes and relaxes the viewer with gentle sounds.  Distant whispers, the rhythmic patter of raindrops, the rustling of leaves in the wind. And in this case, the sound of heavily chained men being deported.

Fascism is back. This time no swastikas, Nazi flags, or deadly bureaucracy, but MAGA hats, right-wing extremist memes, and a triumphant fist held high. No ghettos or concentration camps, but data-driven manhunts and “detention facilities” in El Salvador and Guantanamo Bay. No SS officers or brownshirts, but Proud Boys  and a Capitol mob.

It’s perfectly clear: the US president, Donald Trump, is putting together a fascist regime. And fast. Not only Trump’s political adversaries say so,  his own former advisers do, too.  But what’s more, internationally renowned scholars—the indisputable experts when it comes to fascism—are now sounding the alarm.  

Their warnings still meet with resistance. For many, the label “fascism” is inextricably tied to the Holocaust and should be left in the past out of respect for the six million murdered Jews. Others see the term as exaggerated and alarmist: every fascist so far pales in comparison to Adolf Hitler. Accusing Trump of fascism, they feel, is like yelling “FIRE!” just because someone, somewhere has lit a small flame—a distraction from the very real challenges facing the United States.

And yet it’s precisely that resistance to using the word fascism that’s typical of how fascism works. Fascism thrives by playing down what was previously seen as extremist. And once that happens, any warnings get dismissed as overly alarmist.

Trump takes it to the next level: anyone who accuses him of being fascist gets called fascist right back.  It’s a tried and true tactic to sap language of meaning: If everyone calls their adversaries “fascist,” the word loses its power to warn people about actual fascism.

Instead of continuing to debate whether or not Trump can be called a fascist, it’s better to understand why experts are alerting us. To do that, it’s essential we understand how fascism works, so we can recognize today’s variants, in the US and beyond.

The function of fascism

Fascism conjures up images of the death and destruction of the Third Reich, Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, Francisco Franco’s generals, or perhaps the white hoods of the Ku Klux Klan. When you think of fascism, you think of its most visible and extreme outgrowths. But while everyone has some idea of what fascism means, there’s no clear definition.

In order to recognize fascism as a wider phenomenon, we shouldn’t look to those visible extremes, says Professor Emeritus Robert Paxton, author of the seminal work The Anatomy of Fascism (2005). According to Paxton, we should look at what function fascism serves for politicians within a democracy .  

That function is strategic. Fascism is a way to take political grievance, shared by members of a dominant group in society, and mobilize it against some supposed “enemy,” often aided by a degree of societal breakdown during a time of crisis. It’s similar in that sense to right-wing populism, sometimes called fascism light . 

But where populist leaders stretch the ground rules of democracy, fascists take things further. They change the rules, seize absolute power, and destroy those seen as foes, using violence if need be.

Fueling this strategy is emotion, not some coherent set of ideological convictions. Ultranationalism and an unshakable belief in the “survival of the fittest” are always part of fascism, but aside from that, there’s no unifying story.

“A fascist just has to be a storyteller,” historian Timothy Snyder points out.  The fascist’s words matter, in the sense that they must provoke rage. But what he says, and whether it’s true, matters a great deal less. The fascist simply has to “find a pulse and hold it.”