Let’s talk about the F-word.
Not the one uttered 269 times in “Reservoir Dogs” and 569 times in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
I’m talking about the one that should be on everyone’s lips – because it so concisely describes our current hellhole and it’s long past time to mince words.
Especially this particular word, one deployed by veteran conservative attorney and evangelical Christian David French: “We’re living in a version of the dual state. Not to the same extent as the Nazis, of course, but (the) Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal…They went to work, paid their taxes, entered into contracts and did all the things you normally do in a functioning nation. But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power regardless of the rule of law.”
That’s where we are, folks. That’s why word “fascist” is now seriously (albeit belatedly) in circulation. Commentator Jennifer Rubin, who rose to prominence as a staunch conservative voice, is urging Americans to “mount even greater assaults on the Trump fascist enterprise.” Jonathan Rauch, the veteran political observer, had long refused to invoke the word – until now: “When the facts change, I change my mind. Recent events have brought Trump’s governing style into sharper focus. Fascist best describes it.”
It’s about time.
The blatantly obvious has finally become impossible to deny or ignore. The summary execution of U.S. citizens by lawless paramilitary goons, the mass surveillance of protesters and dissenters, the MAGA seizure of ballots in a Democratic Georgia stronghold (a dress rehearsal for MAGA assaults on the 2026 midterm tallies), the federal arrest of two independent journalists… It’s all happening, the fascists in power are turning the screws, and nobody is safe.
Some prominent ex-Trump employees openly used the F-word, yet still people didn’t listen. Or perhaps, thanks to our fractured media climate, they never heard the warnings. Mark Milley, who served Trump as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in 2024 he was “fascist to the core.” So did John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff.
Knowing this, we could’ve shut the fascists down via the ballot box, in 2024. It was all for naught, for many reasons:
– Because we’re so polarized, it’s near impossible to sway anyone’s mind.
– When millions of Americans hear the F-word, they associate it with swastikas in grainy black and white on the History Channel – something remote in time and foreign by definition.
– Over the years, the F-word has been invoked with such abandon that for many it has been leached of all meaning. Back in my college days, during the last phase of the Vietnam war, cops were routinely (and idiotically) derided as “fascist pigs.” George W. Bush was stupidly denounced as a fascist.
– We’re a very naive people. Timothy Snyder, a top expert on fascism, explained this two years ago: “We lack the experience of the collapse of the republic. And now we are confronted with people in power who wish to bring it down…As soon as the collapse of the German republic in 1933 is evoked, American voices commence a fake lament – America is uniquely good, so nothing about Nazis can ever apply, and/or Hitler was uniquely evil and so nothing concerning him is relevant.”
Granted, many of the 77 million voters who re-hired the fascist did so because they were concerned about illegal immigration and sincerely believed that he would mass-deport the people who lacked the proper paperwork. But it required only minimal cognition to recognize that he would enforce his mandate in a fascistic manner.
I have to assume some of those are Trump voters are now saying, “Gee, I didn’t vote for this!” But, tempting as it may be to denounce them, the better choice in this dire time of crisis is to welcome them. The mission to salvage American democracy must be bipartisan.
And there are reasons to be encouraged.
Minnesotans have shown what feet on the street can do. Even Congress is resisting his quest to make ICE his primary instrument of terror. Various election-monitoring groups intend to foil his plot to rig the midterms – and voters are already pushing back, as evidenced by what happened this weekend in a Texas state Senate election. Back in 2022, voters in that reliably red district had elected a Republican by a landslide margin of 20 points. In 2024 voters there had favored Trump by 17 points. But in this weekend’s special election, the Democratic state Senate candidate decimated his Trump-endorsed opponent by 14 points. In an upscale suburban district.
Translation: Unlike Adolf Hitler, who speedily destroyed German democracy in 1933 with barely a ripple of public dissent, Trump’s fascism is broadly unpopular, more so with each passing week. The fervent hope, among resistants, is that his latest brand will ultimately go bust, like Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and Trump Shuttle.
To rephrase Dylan Thomas, those of us who still revere democracy will not go gentle into that good night.
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Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com