ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the political-desires that network with the argumentative efforts of the Trump campaign and administration and describes a theoretical model for locating fascist desire in a variety of argumentative forms. The executive order, and arguments for its necessity, is an exemplary case of the force of fascistic desire in argumentation. The President depicted critical media coverage of the order as fake news and the courts as biased, rendering those who resisted and/or provided critical coverage of the order “unreasonable”. Fascistic argumentation serves as one example of “postdialectical” argumentation, exceeding the metaphysical foundations of what, since Plato, constitutes good argumentation: the ideal of reasonable argumentation. Fascistic desires in argumentation exist in defiance to assumed dialectical underpinnings of argumentation for the simple reason that fascistic arguments negate the possibility of critical-rational argumentation to occur as a condition for its existence.
