Trump's fascism is neither uniquely American nor merely imported, but a convergence of the US’s own racial-terror history and a long-standing admiration for Nazi ideology and aesthetics.
As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continue to wreak border violence upon US cities, an amateur Historikerstreit is playing out on social media over the origins of white supremacist authoritarianism under President Donald Trump.
Hobby historians and academics turned content-creators are at odds over whether America in 2026 is more comparable to Nazi Germany or to the many instances in the US’s own history of racial terrorism.
“ICE is the American Gestapo,” wrote bestselling author Stephen King tersely on X, a reference to Nazi Germany’s notorious secret police.
Savala Nolan, a racial and social justice scholar at UC Berkley Law, disagrees.
“ICE is not the gestapo; ICE is ours. It’s a manifestation of the same systems and beliefs that animated slave patrols, military conquest against the indigenous, vigilante night riders, and German Shepherds on Black ppl,” she posted on Instagram.
True, these homegrown, historical continuities are hard to miss when one looks at ICE’s and CBP’s campaign of terror against American communities of colour.
But calls to integrate the autochthonous origins of Trump’s anti-immigrant persecution in analyses of the current moment should not obscure the historical influence Nazism has had on American fascism, even if it is true that Nazism itself “was inspired by America’s institutionalized racism and indigenous holocausts,” as Haydar Ali, a Toronto-based rapper, poet and writer, reminds us. (more...)
American fascism is both homegrown and imported
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