The global left and their many friends in the media are insisting with increasing hysteria that Donald Trump is imposing fascism on America. Their apocalyptical narrative is as simple as it is false: President Trump has begun the transformation of the USA into a fascist state. But the feverish intensity with which this tall story is told cannot conceal its mendacity.

Trump has not, as fascists do, created blackshirt hit squads to terrorise and torture opponents, nor courts to jail them without just cause. And no rational observer believes his aim is to replace political parties with a one-party cult, or democracy with dictatorship. But above all, perhaps, the story is false because, regardless of what you were taught, and are told, fascism is a far-left, not far-right, phenomenon.

Whatever else he may be, the Donald is not left-wing, unless you count his mission to protect the American working class from the negative aspects of globalisation. But for the left and their intellectual minders in command of the citadels of our culture, only their truth counts.

Yet the ‘proof’ they offer of Trump’s alleged fascism is risible. It includes his highly popular crackdown on illegal immigrants and his recent deployment of troops in Los Angeles after days of often riotous demos against that crackdown.

It even includes his decision to hold a military parade in Washington DC on 14th June to mark the US army’s 250th anniversary, and his 79th birthday. This, apparently, was a provocative display of – to use a new left-wing buzz-word – his ‘militarisation’ of America.

To ram home the point, there were anti-Trump demos across America ‘in defence of democracy’ to coincide with the parade. As one protester explained to CBS: ‘We need to show there are more Americans fighting this fascism than supporting it.’

Progressive intellectuals, meanwhile, queue up to leap on board the Trump’s-a-fascist bandwagon.

They include the left-wing playwright, Sir David Hare, who in his Spectator diary earlier this month produced a list of the ‘16 principal characteristics of fascism’, so vague as to be meaningless. And he used the word ‘fascism’ to lump together Italian fascism and its hybrid German offspring, Nazism, despite one glaring difference between the two: for many years, there was nothing anti-Semitic about Italian fascism until its inventor Benito Mussolini’s fatal military alliance with Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s.

Between 1922 when Mussolini came to power and 1938 when he introduced anti-Semitic laws, fascism did not persecute Italy’s 50,000 Jews. Many Italian Jews were fascists, as was Mussolini’s main mistress for most of that period, Margherita Sarfatti.

Even........

© The Spectator