It’s hardly surprising that social media is full of claims that fascism now reigns in the United States. Since 2026 began, two features of fascist regimes have been very visible.
On one the hand, aggression abroad—the violent kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores in Venezuela, the threats of military action against Iran and Greenland. On the other hand, domestic repression—above all, the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis last week by an Ice agent.
Donald Trump’s drive to centralise power in his hands is undeniable. So he says he now runs Venezuela and controls access to its oil. And he’s trying again to subordinate the Federal Reserve Board—by threatening its chair, Jerome Powell, with criminal prosecution.
But this doesn’t mean a consolidated fascist regime now rules. The reaction to Good’s shooting shows this—mass protests, continuing resistance on the streets to Ice and numerous denunciations of the federal government by state authorities.
This is no reason for complacency. In Germany, the Nazis seized control of the state very quickly following Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933. But it took several years after Benito Mussolini became Italian prime minister in October 1922 for the fascists to consolidate power.In the Marxist tradition, fascism is understood as a mass movement of the lower middle class cemented together by a pseudo-revolutionary ideology that seeks total power to crush the organised working class and expand externally. Some, but not all, elements of this exist in the US today.
Ideological radicalisation to the far right is well advanced. Furious Minds, a new book by Laura K Field, documents in detail the emergence of several intellectual schools that see Trumpism as a heaven-sent opportunity to eradicate liberalism. .
Their influence can be seen in key Make America Great Again (Maga) figures such as Steve Bannon, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Michael Anton, who drafted Trump’s new national security strategy.
What doesn’t exist is a coherent street movement like Mussolini’s Blackshirts or Hitler’s Brownshirts. Organised fascists groups remain negligible. The Maga base has power, but as a source of electoral pressure on Trump and his allies over issues such as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
We should be alert, however, to the way in which state apparatuses can partly substitute for the street movement. Ice and its partner the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) offer the clearest example.
A very timely article by Michael Macher on the Phenomenal World website doesn’t just document the vast amounts of money Trump is pouring into these agencies. As he writes, “Ice’s annual budget increased threefold to around $28 billion through 2029, making it the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country.”
But Macher also argues that as the US state ramped up targeting migrants, starting with the administrations of George W Bush and Barack Obama, Ice and CBP increasingly pushed a far right agenda from below.
He said, “Militant actors within Ice and CBP have exploited the political contention over immigration to increase their resources, autonomy and power within the Department of Homeland Security—actively shaping the Department in their own image.
This political mobilisation took place primarily through their respective labour unions. “As organisations mandated to advance the material interests of rank and file agents”, he continues, they “became incubators for far right projects”.
The agents of these ideologically-driven, materially bloated apparatuses are now swaggering around many US cities. As with the stormtroopers, their guns and uniforms and dubious legal authority make them feel big.
Renee Good didn’t die because she threatened the life of her killer. She died because she and her wife challenged him. It was a misogynistic, homophobic shooting. Maybe the killer feels big again now.
So a new form of fascism may be beginning to take shape in the US. Trump and his lieutenants certainly show no sign of retreating. They can be stopped. But this will require the most determined mass mobilisation on an unprecedented scale. We have been warned.
