Last week, the New York Times reported that the incoming Trump administration is planning to use a legal loophole to close the U.S. border with Mexico. “President-elect Donald J. Trump is likely to justify his plans to seal off the border with Mexico by citing a public health emergency from immigrants bringing disease into the United States,” the Times noted of the incoming administration’s plans to invoke Title 42. “Now he just has to find one.”
Without wading into tedious fascism debates, it’s worth noting that Trump’s approach to policymaking bears a striking resemblance to totalitarian movements of the early twentieth century. In an essay “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” political theorist Hannah Arendt distinguished totalitarianism from earlier forms of governmental tyranny.
“What is novel in the ideological propaganda of totalitarian movements even before they seize power is the immediate transformation of ideological content into living reality through instruments of totalitarian organization,” Arendt wrote in 1954. She continued: “The Nazi movement, far from organizing people who happened to believe in racism, organized them according to objective race criteria, so that race ideology was no longer a matter of mere opinion or argument or even fanaticism, but constituted the actual living reality … The Nazis, as distinguished from other racists, did not so much believe in the truth of racism as desire to change the world into a race reality.”
Similarly, rather than studying the world as it is in an empirical sense, identifying problems, and proposing solutions, Trumpism starts with “solutions” consistent with its racist and xenophobic worldview—extrapolated from slogans like “Make America Great Again,” “Build the Wall,” “Drain the Swamp”—and then goes in search of “real” problems to justify their implementation.
The press and Democratic Party have, unfortunately, gamely played along—denouncing Trumpism’s false statements of fact but largely conceding the underlying “problems” as worthy policy debates. For example, outlets like the Atlantic and New York Times insist on pretending that gender nonconformity among children is a serious “problem” worthy of national political debate when less than 0.1 percent of U.S. minors take gender-affirming medication.
The same goes for immigration. Mainstream newspapers and cable outlets have largely narrated as a “crisis” the Biden administration’s mismanagement of a dysfunctional asylum process—dysfunction, worth noting, that was deliberately sown by Republican governors to justify their racist anti-migrant policies. This crisis framing has been readily adopted by “Blue State” Democrats like New York City mayor Eric Adams and New York governor Kathy Hochul to obfuscate their own mismanagement of the issue.
Journalists, as Stuart Hall and his collaborators once argued, are “secondary definers.” Their commitment to “objectivity” means that they can’t weigh in on matters of public policy directly. Instead, they rely upon experts and public officials as “primary definers.” “Effectively, the primary definition sets the limit for all subsequent discussions by framing the what the problem is,” Hall and colleagues wrote.
When Democratic policymakers accept Republican policy proposals as though they are good faith assessments of empirical reality, they unwittingly cede the struggle over framing the problems we face to the right. If both Democratic and Republican officials are calling something a “crisis,” journalists have little choice but to report it as such and voters little reason to think otherwise.
These structural political and media dynamics illuminate why the Harris campaign’s strategy to “moderate” to appeal to anti-Trump conservatives fell so flat. When one party is actively bending “reality” to conform to its ideology, the opposing party needs to draw stark contrasts—to define the world differently, to articulate a vision that bridges alternative ideals with empirical reality.
Instead, the Democratic Party has largely focused on clearing the path for Trump to implement his immigration purge. In the wake of Harris’ election defeat, several “moderate” Democratic Party consultants and public officials cowardly blamed the party’s support for transgender rights for their failure to stem the Trumpian tide.
Insofar as the party has offered any meaningful opposition, it has tended to unhelpfully depict Trumpism as a monolith. The Harris campaign didn’t so much run for anything as it ran against Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s lengthy wish list for a second Trump term.
While there are many horrors in the ideological vision contained within Project 2025, Trumpism is built on the foundation of the modern conservative movement, a motley array of conflicting and often contradictory interests—more often united by common enemies than by shared priorities. (This was true of the 900-page Project 2025 itself, which, as too few commentators pointed out last summer, was riven with divergent and often contradictory proposals).
To take the most recent and prominent example, Steve Bannon, long credited with Trump’s 2016 electoral success, is actively seeking to undermine Elon Musk, who has been credited with Trump’s 2024 win. While the Bannon wing of Trumpism is rooted in nationalism, supporting economic warfare against China and opposing “globalist” elites, Musk—the world’s richest man who has considerable business interests in China—is the dictionary definition of a global elite. He represents and serves the interest of a tech industry that, Mark Zuckerberg’s recent MAGA-turn aside, is globally networked and reliant on porous borders to recruit skilled employees and sell its virtual wares.
The scale of deportation envisioned by Trumpism architects like Stephen Miller will not only undermine the tech sector, it will negatively impact the housing, agricultural and food processing sectors as well. If working class Trump supporters are dreaming of a return to pre-pandemic consumer prices and a more stable economy, they won’t like the new problems Trump’s “solutions” will yield.
The Nazis had discipline and a shared ideological vision. Trumpist unity is largely a fiction—conjured by the Democratic Party in a naïve attempt at “defending democracy,” and by a press that is ideologically incapable of thinking or acting for itself.
A robust opposition would seek and target wedges within the Trump coalition—pit conservatism’s component parts against one another. It would amplify contradictions between Trump’s “solutions” and the new problems they will inevitably pose. It would articulate a clear alternative vision, rooted in real empirical conditions, that redefines racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia as harmful and anti-American.
Unless we divide the right and re-define the terms of debate, reality will increasingly conform to Trumpism’s dark and delusional fictions.
