Eighty years ago, King George VI addressed the nation on the occasion of VE Day, marking victory in Europe against Nazi Germany. He was clear about what Allied victory meant: the defeat of fascism and the survival of “every land where freedom is cherished and law and liberty go hand in hand”.
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.
We know, of course, that the politics of Britain’s entry into the Second World War were not nearly as simple as an altruistic move to uphold this liberal axiom; but for generations, from George VI onwards, this has been the story we tell ourselves.
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.
Britain, we tell ourselves, fought for this principle, and each successive year we commemorate the victory, alongside our American allies. Popular descriptions of the Second World War have a tendency to suggest that victory was as pre-ordained as the final battle in any biblical or fantasy narrative: in this telling it was, as Sir Keir Starmer wrote this week, “a victory for good against the assembled forces of hatred, tyranny and evil”. Yet this year, we are celebrating among American “allies” led by Donald Trump. That, if nothing else, would tell us that these battles are never final.
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.
When Trump first came to power in 2016, American commentators hesitated to call him a fascist. One of the few with guts was not a Democrat but a Republican, the prominent neocon and Bush adviser Robert Kagan, who broke cover with an essay in 2016, “This is how fascism comes to America”.
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”.
And like all fascists, he found a minority to blame, or as Kagan put it: “His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of ‘others’ – Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees”.
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.
None of this is to say, with glib simplicity, that Trump is Hitler. It undermines any understanding of the unique nature of antisemitism – which argues that Jews are an inherently stateless and alienated people – to pretend its structures can be directly mapped on to other racisms. However cruel Trump’s treatment of his scapegoats, no one in America is currently herding children into gas chambers.
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.
Rereading the notorious Nuremberg laws this week, I was struck by their overall objective: to create a class of people, trapped within a nation, stripped of their citizenship and their legal protections. (“Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of religion. Consequently, no Jew can be a member of the race.” Ergo, no Jew could be a citizen.)
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.
His targets are primarily people of Hispanic descent and political dissidents: what matters is that Trump, and only Trump, decides who gets to be an American. This is how fascists operate. It is everything we fought against 80 years ago – or at least, claimed to.
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.
The intervention will be unwelcome to most people actually grappling with the reality of Trump: Biden’s refusal to appoint a successor despite his visibly failing health hamstrung the Democratic Party’s campaign against Trump last year.
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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