Each successive year, speeches on the anniversary of VE Day have talked about “freedom” without defining it very closely, but King George’s words make his own meaning clear: in the Second World War we were fighting an enemy which had dispensed with the basic liberal code that the law protects its citizens equally. If we are equal under the law, and the rule of law is robust, no minority can see its civil liberties removed.
square SECOND WORLD WAR Big ReadRoyal congas and 'public lovemaking': How a euphoric Britain celebrated VE Day
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It has been the story on which we built the post-war European polity. As the full horrors of the Holocaust became clear, we rebuilt an international settlement based on the concept of “human rights”: a framework which asserted that the civic rights of each human being were inalienable, allowing no person to be left so unprotected from the worst impulses of their governments as the Jews of Europe once had been.
Trump has done more than any previous American leader to undermine the protection his own constitution once offered to minorities. We are right to celebrate victory over 20th century fascism: as the child of a family still living with the psychological impact of the Holocaust, I know more than most how total that evil was. (Let us simply say that survivors have nightmares, and nightmares are passed down generations.)
But with Trump in the White House, it is clear at least that millions of American voters, and sympathisers around the world, have not learned the basic lessons of the 1930s. That should mute our celebrations. The fight against fascism is not over: it was merely sleeping.
As Kagan pointed out, Trump had replaced the Republican Party with a cult of personality led by his own devotees: “Their allegiance is to him and him alone.” What he promised Americans was not policy detail but “an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence”.
This is textbook fascism: Kagan saw it, as did many of us here in Europe. For many other Americans, even Trump’s opponents, that realisation came too late.
square KATE MALTBY
Trump's fascist disdain for civil liberties is spreading across Europe
Read MoreYet beyond the political aesthetic that Trump shares with the pettier fascist leaders of the 1930s Europe (Italy’s Mussolini, Hungary’s Miklós Horthy, Britain’s Oswald Mosley), he seems to have taken legal lessons direct from Nazi Germany itself.
That is precisely the objective of Trump’s recent legal manoeuvres, bending legal precedent to claim he has the power to strip citizens, Green Card holders and residents of basic rights to residency, due process and even citizenship. Trump recently boasted that he will soon focus on deporting “home-grown criminals”, aka “citizens”, to El Salvador’s prisons, and last year promised his voters he would institute “remigration”, a far-right code for ethnic cleansing.
As Europe gathered to mark VE Day, former president Joe Biden emerged to condemn Trump’s policy in Ukraine as “modern-day appeasement”, a clear comparison to Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to conciliate Hitler.
But it also fundamentally misunderstands the problem. Trump isn’t a prevaricating diplomat, optimistically appeasing fascists. Donald Trump is our modern-day fascist.
If we accept his assault on “the law and liberty” of contemporary America, we must admit we have abandoned the rights-based international order for which we claim we fought a war.
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