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Chapter
A Fascist in the White House, 2017–21
DOI link for A Fascist in the White House, 2017–21
A Fascist in the White House, 2017–21 book
A Fascist in the White House, 2017–21
DOI link for A Fascist in the White House, 2017–21
A Fascist in the White House, 2017–21 book
ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, titled “A Fascist in the White House”, begins with a discussion of numerous ways in which Trump’s rise to power and presidency matches the story of American fascist ascendancy and chaos told in Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. The chapter then uses the fascism typology and sorting system developed in the previous chapter to provide a detailed record of the nonstop nightmare that was the presidency of a man who Noam Chomsky came by early 2020 to see as “the most dangerous criminal in human history”. This chapter lists no less than 400 Trump atrocities, each “filed” under at least one of the 8 fascism-defining folders advanced in Chapter 2. “The enormity and variety of Mr. Trump’s misdeeds”, The New York Times’ Editorial Board observed in October of 2020, “can feel overwhelming. Repetition has dulled the sense of outrage, and the accumulation of new outrages leaves little time to dwell on the particulars”. This chapter seeks to ease the overwhelm and focus the outrage by providing a precise historical and political-ideological framework within which to understand the blitzkrieg of trauma-inducing madness that was the Trump presidency.