Former President Donald Trump is one of the worst men that the United States could select to serve in the White House. Whereas in 2016, he had no political record to run on, in 2024, the country has lived through the chaos that defined his presidency.
Of course, not all that chaos was Trump’s fault.
At least half (though I’d argue more than that) of the crises we were all afflicted by during Trump’s tumultuous four years in the White House were the result of Trump’s crazed political enemies (not only Democrats but the elite members of the Republican Party as well as key elements of the Administrative State and mainstream media).
Now, Mehdi Hassan of MSNBC, a man known for his previous suspicious ties to the al Qaeda-friendly regime in Qatar and who infamously compared all non-Muslims in the West to dogs and cattle (which is how Islamic extremists describe Westerners that they seek to terrorize), is calling Trump a “fascist.” Certainly, Trump is an extremist.
And many of his most ardent supporters appear to belong to a Trumpian cult of personality more than a Right-of-center political party.
I, too, fear that America is going to be made to choose between the Reds and the Browns, as were the Germans of interwar Germany (and we know how that ended).
But the context behind that which Hassan is referring to is the key difference here.
Trump Wasn’t Tough At All on Rioters
Hassan uses a handful of examples from Trump’s time in office to somehow prove that the former president is a fascist and, therefore, unworthy to be president again. His examples are mostly awful.
Let me explain.
First, Hassan believes Trump’s deployment of 75,000 agents of the Federal Government during the hellacious 2020 George Floyd race riots was a sign of Trump’s inherent fascism.
Really, Hassan?
Trump delayed deploying peace officers for weeks, as most of the country’s largest cities burned under the incendiary rage of Leftist mob violence.
Some of Trump’s closest supporters were aghast at the time at the way Trump eschewed invoking the Insurrection Act to quell the violent race riots and timidly deployed small squadrons of federal agents to randomly arrest rioters.
For the record, more than $1 billion worth of damage—the most in the history of riots in America—was reported to have occurred before Trump finally decided to act. Why did he hesitate?
It was only after many days and weeks that Trump finally decided to take the situation under his control—by then, most of the damage had been done, and Trump looked insanely weak to most voters.
What “Muslim Ban”?
Another example Hassan uses is Trump’s “Muslim ban” that he enacted in his first few weeks as president. Again, context matters here.
When Trump took power, the United States had been suffering through a wave of escalating terrorist attacks perpetrated by members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
One of the methods ISIS was using to attack targets in Europe, Canada, and the United States was the open immigration systems within each country. Trump was taking the precautionary step of preventing possible threats from easily entering the United States. It was always a temporary measure.
What’s more, it wasn’t specific to Muslims, as Hassan suggests.
How could it have been when countries like Venezuela and North Korea were on the list of banned countries?
It was extreme for past presidents to have simply shrugged and behaved as though they could have done nothing to reduce the threats that lax immigration policies with hostile nations posed us!
Mark Milley Defied Constitutional Norms
Hassan then tries to make the case that Trump’s alleged threat to kill former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley (ret.) was egregious. Milley had reached out to his Chinese counterpart without prior authorization during the Trump challenge to the 2020 Election.
Milley did this to supposedly assure the uncomfortable Chinese government that Milley would inform China’s military if America was slated to attack in the chaos of Trump’s legal challenge to the 2020 election.
Trump claims that was treason and, in earlier times, would have resulted in the general’s death. That was an extreme statement.
But the deeper issue here—that has always dogged Trump’s political career—is who controls whom? Constitutionally, the president is supposed to have control over all aspects of the federal bureaucracy.
Yet, as Milley’s cavalier behavior toward the proper chain of command clearly demonstrated, the bureaucracy believed Trump worked for them.
What About the Russia Collusion Lie?
That’s an extreme position to take and it actually smacks of fascism of the kind that Hassan is wrongly accusing Trump of.
At no point does Hassan ever care to acknowledge the way in which the intelligence community was weaponized by the Democratic Party in 2016 to both fabricate and push totally fake accusations that Trump was a Russian stooge.
Nor was there any mention of how the intelligence community allowed itself to be deployed by the Democrats to improperly impeach President Trump for a phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart or how elements of the intelligence community were used by the Biden Campaign to cover up allegations that Hunter Biden was engaged in a widespread, illicit influence-peddling operation on behalf of his father, Joe Biden.
Mehdi Hassan Likes Democrat Fascism Over Republican Fascism
All these instances listed above are actual examples of the kind of behavior that fascists routinely use. They were all done not by Trump’s extremism, but by the extremism of the Democratic Party for many years.
Oddly, Mehdi Hassan sees nothing wrong with it. Hassan doesn’t hate fascism. He just doesn’t like Donald Trump’s very soft form of it. He far more prefers the heavy-handedness of the Democrats’ version of authoritarianism.
Far from being an anomaly in American politics, Trump is the inevitable reaction of the Right to decades of Left-wing extremism. It’s not acceptable. But nothing the Democrats have done over the last few decades has been acceptable either.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor and an energy analyst at the The-Pipeline, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert occasionally serves as a Subject Matter Expert for various organizations, including the Department of Defense. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon. He writes conservative opinion pieces for this publication.
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