∼ ∼ ∼ This is the first in a series of features about books that can help you prepare for Trump 2.0. Watch this space for future round-ups covering White Christian Nationalist Extremism, Ideological Misogyny, How to Resist Trump’s Autocratic Rule, and other topics. ∼ ∼ ∼
If there was a single moment in Donald Trump’s first term as president that revealed his true sense of self — and portended The Sequel — it might have been the October evening in 2020 when he returned to the White House after being hospitalized with a severe case of Covid.
Wearing a blue suit and a white mask, Trump stepped gingerly from the Marine One helicopter, ambled across the South Lawn, and ascended the exterior staircase (unusual for a president) to the second-floor balcony. There, before the glare of spotlights and camera flashes, he dramatically removed his mask to assure the public of his recovery, and then, though laboring to breathe, he pushed out his chest and chin to strike a triumphant pose, very much resembling (helped by thick makeup) an adored Mussolini on those balconies in Rome. Like Il Duce, Trump even held a long salute.
Watching the spectacle, the cynic had to wonder if — given Trump’s enthusiasm for strongmen like Duterte, Putin, and Kim Jong Un — maybe someone at Walter Reed had been supplementing the president’s infusions of monoclonal antibodies with morale-boosting bedside screenings of old fascist footage? Perhaps the ever-faithful Steve Bannon had sneaked into the room? MAGA architect, chief strategist for Trump’s 2016 campaign, and, briefly, a first-term presidential counselor, Bannon openly professed, in 2018 in The Spectator, being “fascinated by Mussolini.” He’d been interviewed by author Nicholas Farrell, who’d tried to shine up the dictator’s reputation in a revisionist biography, claiming, for example, that Il Duce had been in a “fury” over the execution of 15 partisans and suggesting that his order for the murder of his foreign minister and son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, had been justified by circumstances. Bannon was quick to praise the book: “You put the juice back in Mussolini.” He went on, like the strongman’s fanboy: “He was clearly loved by women. He was a guy’s guy … all that virility. He also had an amazing fashion sense, right, that whole thing with the uniforms.”
“We’re going medieval on these people,” Bannon promises in his show’s intro.
Bannon might give an additional thumbs-up to Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, an incisive survey of authoritarian leaders across the decades, and one that brings Trump into the mix, revealing, directly or indirectly, his striking similarities to others on the list. Mussolini, in particular. “Strongmen,” Ben-Ghiat writes, “probe the sore spots of the nation, stimulating feelings of humiliation and anxiety, and offering their own leadership as a salve. Mussolini promised to restore the glory of Ancient Rome….” Does that ring a bell, say, for the mythical era of the MAGA fantasy when white men were everywhere worshipped?
Later, nailing another Trump trait, the author writes, “The strongman’s trick is to seem exceptional and yet to embody the national everyman, with all of his endearing flaws.” She goes on to tell us how the Italian novelist Elsa Morante believed that Mussolini’s wide appeal came from being “a mediocre man, crude, uncultured”; Ben-Ghiat later continues with that same theme, referring to strongmen in general: “The familiarity of these personages, marketed by their personality cults and populist ideologies as ‘one of us,’ is also why many people don’t see them as dangerous early on.”
Listen to Bannon these days, on his War Room podcast, and you should definitely feel a great sense of danger. Though banished from the White House in 2017 for his clashes with staff, he’s come back into Trump’s favor after serving a four-month prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena relating to his involvement with the January 6 insurrection. Somewhat of a Trump administration éminence grise, he now exerts his influence from the sidelines. When he’s not threatening vengeance on anyone who tried to thwart Trump’s second ascent to the presidency (“We’re going medieval on these people,” he promises in his show’s intro), Bannon is advocating a coup-like takeover of the federal government’s executive branch, echoing the core plans of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which aims to give Trump unprecedented power.
Vetted Trump loyalists will form “beachhead teams” to begin “seizing control of the institutions.”
The Trump team has dispensed with their pre-election smoke-and-mirrors campaign of disavowing the Project and has all but declared a full-on embrace. Project 2025’s frightening core plans center around so-called “unitary executive theory.” It’s hardly a theory at all. Rather, it’s a megalomaniacal interpretation of the first sentence in Article II of the Constitution: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Those with authoritarian dreams claim that this statement gives Trump total control over executive-branch agencies, removing any conceivable independence from the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and so on through a long list of entities that set and enforce regulations and law. In 2019, Trump himself previewed the notion, with his usual adolescent level of comprehension: “I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
As others have pointed out, all of this raises disturbing parallels to the Nazi Party’s Enabling Act of 1933, which gave Hitler the quasi-legal ability to issue decrees without the need for parliamentary approval, thereby handing him a dictatorship. Likewise, Trump’s team is scheming to eliminate aspects of the Senate’s authority. First, they’ll try to use recess appointments (with an orchestrated Senate recess) to install Trump’s cabinet picks without confirmation hearings. The Supreme Court could block that effort (based on a strong opinion in 2014 from Justice Antonin Scalia), but how likely is it that moderate-turned-MAGA-champion John Roberts, who led his justices to grant Trump immunity from almost any crime — essentially giving the thumbs-up to authoritarian rule — would have the spine to impede Trump at the get-go? (Check out the Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia entry on the Nazi’s Enabling Act and you’ll find this: “The Supreme Court did nothing to challenge the legitimacy of this measure.”)
Second, as the government-wrecking crew of Musk and Ramaswamy recently declared in the Wall Street Journal, Trump will attempt to exert control over the Senate’s appropriation of funds by claiming his right to reject or reduce specified allocations to programs or organizations that he doesn’t like, such as — let’s say — assistance to the poor, or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This withholding of funding, called impoundment, has been mostly prohibited since 1974 by the Impoundment Control Act, but the Trump administration will likely force the Supreme Court to decide whether the Act is unconstitutional. The Court has previously ruled against impoundment, notably in the Nixon era, but since they overturned Roe. vs. Wade, anything is possible. What’s more, Musk and Ramaswamy will be working closely with the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), slated to be Russell Vought. He’s the author of Project 2025’s chapter on the president taking total control of the Executive Branch.
These top-down power-grabbing schemes are only half the story. A second effort will start on the inside. Typically, in the first few weeks of a new administration, the president sends out several thousand appointees to lower-level positions (which don’t require Senate confirmation) to begin setting up shop. But Trump will almost certainly use a “Schedule F” executive order to give the administration more than 10 times that number of appointees, by removing employment protections from career civil servants deemed to be unsupportive of MAGA — a massive shakeout that could result, by some estimates, in the exodus of a hundred thousand federal workers. Bannon, with his usual brutal way of expressing himself, describes the process as “a war to the knife,” in which vetted Trump loyalists will form “beachhead teams” to begin “seizing control of the institutions.”
All of this is laid out in great detail by Project 2025, an authoritarian playbook if there ever was one. To best understand its vast scope, go to “Exposing the Far-Right Assault on America,” a series of articles from the Center for American Progress that summarize the ways in which the Trump administration will use the Project as a guide, not just for concentrating power but for eliminating civil rights protections for people of color, LGBTQ identities, and women; weakening regulations for clean air; getting rid of no-cost vaccines for the millions of Medicare recipients; favoring “biblically based” notions of family; and organizing intentionally cruel, Nazi-like mass deportations of immigrants through the establishment of detention camps.
Chillingly, those are just a few of the hurtful and destructive acts the Trump administration will attempt to sell as reasonable and necessary. As Yale professor Jason Stanley writes, in How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, it’s what authoritarians do so well: “enroll [us] in a state where everyone deemed ‘worthy’ of human status is increasingly subjugated by mass delusion.” Stanley neatly delineates the basic mechanisms of the strongman’s world-building system of deceit — mechanisms that include a mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, a state of unreality, and victimhood, all of which run like checkboxes for the tactics of MAGA, and for the daily exhortations of Steve Bannon. Such a deluge of hate, lies, and fantasy, Stanley points out, numbs societies into complacency. “Those who lived through transitions from democracy to fascism,” he tells us, “regularly emphasize … the tendency of populations to normalize the once unthinkable.”
Bingo. Professional athletes everywhere are now doing the stiff-armed Trump dance to the amusement of the fans, while Trump himself keeps promising to pardon, on Day 1, the perpetrators of the deadly January 6 insurrection. The unthinkable is here, and we have already normalized it. ❖
In the Voice’s previous incarnation, Robert Shuster wrote pieces on art, culture, and books. He is the author of the novel “To Zenzi.”
∼ ∼ ∼ This article is part of a series—At 250, Who Will America Be?—reporting on threats to American democracy as we approach the nation’s Semiquincentennial, on July 4, 2026. ∼ ∼ ∼
