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By Patrick Lawrence / The Floutist
26 JANUARY—Yesterday, news having arrived Saturday that Immigration and Enforcement agents have shot another resident of Minneapolis—this the third, the second that amounts to point-blank murder—The New York Times ran a headline in its Sunday editions that bears a very heavy load. “Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis” is a Times magazine piece by Charles Homans, a political reporter who grew up in Minnesota. He had returned in mid–January, a week after the fatal shooting of Renee Good, to spend 10 days watching I.C.E. goons go about their unlawful business. “What I saw, as federal agents stormed the city and residents banded together to protect themselves,” Homans writes, “was a dark, dystopian future becoming reality.”
You can see his point easily enough. Homans is far from the first to make it, indeed. Others have long advanced the argument that there is no point fearing an American dystopia to come: It has already arrived and we live in it. But to see such thoughts make their way into our acceptable discourse—the sayable as against the great, sprawling unsayable: This is a new turn. America is unraveling: The Times has for the first time apprised the 1.1 million people who read it on Sunday of this. I wonder what the paper will do when the obvious question arises: Now what?
Renee Good was a 37–year old a mother of three when she was shot three times and died at the wheel of her car. That was 7 January. A week later, just as Homans arrived, I.C.E. agents shot and wounded Julio Cesar Sosa–Celis, an immigrant without papers, who intervened as I.C.E. pursued another “illegal.” As of Saturday we have the case of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, also 37 and a registered nurse at the local Veterans Affairs hospital. Pretti was recording a confrontation between I.C.E. and a gathering of demonstrators when I.C.E. and Border Patrol enforcers pinned him to the street and fired 10 bullets into him.
Per usual, the Trump regime proves thoroughly indifferent to the discernible truth of these incidents. The Homeland Security Department’s accounts of them are at odds with video-recorded reality and the testimony of witnesses. D.H.S. identifies Good and Pretti as “domestic terrorists.” This is more than preposterous rhetoric. These are assertions, as open as they can possibly be, that evidence, law, and reason itself do not matter anymore: Force is impervious to these things. As Homans puts it, I.C.E. has turned Minneapolis into “a theater of power.”
Language, the naming of things, is changing. Senior Minnesota officials, including Tim Walz, its wayward governor, and Jacob Frey, the gutsy mayor of Minneapolis, are calling I.C.E. “an occupation army.” The Trump administration is now a “regime” to some commentators in corporate media. You can read that America is now “a terror state.” David Brooks, the thinking man’s conservative on The Times’s opinion page, writes of the “tyranny” that has descended upon us.
Like millions of others, I have watched dozens of the videos coming out of Minneapolis since I.C.E. arrived there in December, and they have—again, as with many others—transformed my thinking. There can no longer be any question that President Trump and his “law enforcement” adjutants, notably but not only Kristi Noem, the shockingly crude D.H.S. secretary, have in one year made I.C.E. into a paramilitary force of the sort commonly associated with distant dictatorships. A lot of people now protesting the presence of I.C.E. in U.S. cities call it “America’s Gestapo.” I would have dismissed this as overstatement even a couple of months ago. It seems time now to consider this reference more carefully.
In the same line, liberal commentators have for years shrieked about Trump as the agent of American fascism, and I have had no time whatsoever for these people. Now this merits reconsideration, too. Proper nomenclature is essential to a clear understanding of things—a point I have made numerous times in this space. Hyperbole makes no contribution to clarity and discredits those who resort to it. But to flinch in denial is equally of no use.
Has the reigning regime turned America fascist? Is it in the process of doing so? Either way, what do we mean by this term? These are our questions.
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When Sinclair Lewis wrote and published It Can’t Happen Here, the noted novel wherein he warned of fascism’s rise in America, he was married to Dorothy Thompson, the renowned journalist and radio broadcaster. Fascism in Europe was then much on Lewis’s mind: Thompson was covering the Reich and Mussolini’s Italy, and she was expelled from Germany in 1934; Lewis brought out the novel in 1935. He set his story one year ahead, 90 years ago. “What will happen when America has a dictator?” is the line atop the dust jacket of the book’s first edition.
Lewis’s novel has never since been out of print and has drawn renewed attention since Donald Trump began his rise to political prominence with his famously dramatic descent on the golden escalator at Trump Tower in mid–June 2015. It is obvious why Lewis set his story one year ahead. Far-right extremists, some openly fascist, were on the rise at the time, and no one knew where this would lead.
Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, a bombastic demagogue who sweeps into the presidency on promises of radical economic and social reform in the cause of the little man, is the very mold from which Trump is cut. Here is a snippet of a speech Lewis includes, drawn from a book, Zero Hour—Over the Top, Windrip had ghost-written for his presidential campaign:
I want to stand up on my hind legs and not just admit but frankly holler right out that we’ve got to change our system a lot, maybe even change the whole Constitution… The Executive has got to have a freer hand and be able to move quick in an emergency, and not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates. BUT… these new changes are only a means to an End, and that End is and must be, fundamentally, the same principles of Liberty, Equality, and Justice that were advocated by the Founding Fathers of this great land back in 1776!
See what I mean? In getting his fictitious Windrip down Lewis got Trump down with uncanny prescience. Windrip favors wars abroad as displays of American power and resolve. He outlaws dissent and obsesses about his political enemies. He has neutralized Congress to keep it out of his way and rules by way of a purposely fearsome paramilitary force. All this in the name of patriotism and “traditional American values.”
Lewis does not name the Buzz Windrip phenomenon as I will now, but It Can’t Happen Here is the story of what is called “apple pie fascism.” This refers to the argument abroad in the 1930s among rightists and Hitler–Mussolini symps—and incredibly enough the argument was made—that fascism sits naturally among Americans, perfectly compatible with the patriotism and all those down-home values for which Windrip claimed to stand.
Sinclair Lewis’s novel is oddly foretelling of our moment even if it is not very well-written. (Style was never his strongest suit.) And the mind turns back to it as Trump and the incompetents with whom he surrounds himself proceed. So much of what they do adds up to the sequestration of executive power in the Buzz Windrip fashion. Rather than calming the increasingly violent confrontations between citizens and federal enforcement agencies that are patently out of control, the Trump regime is evidently intent on encouraging them as exhibitions of the regime’s without-limits prerogative.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and a major influence in the White House, is—another strangely accurate correspondence—the Lee Sarason of It Can’t Happen Here. Sarason was Buzz Windrip’s private secretary and closest adviser, a man who held democracy and all its institutions in utter contempt in favor of rule by a small, elite oligarchy. It was Sarason who ghosted Zero Hour, the aforementioned book to which Windrip put his name.
Here is Miller on Fox News 13 January, six days after Renee Good’s murder and a day prior to the shooting of Julio Sosa–Celis:
To all I.C.E. officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. The Department of Justice has made it clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against I.C.E. officers, then they will face justice.
Miller’s purposely menacing warning amounts to a dispensation for I.C.E. agents to shoot those demonstrating against the agency’s Draconian interventions. And how well this has since worked out, I have to say. Think about this, and it should not take long. Immunity comes to impunity. Miller has effectively declared I.C.E. a force that operates beyond all civilian accountability, precisely as the American military and the C.I.A. do. Closer and closer do we draw to a police state, a military state, or a combination of both unique to our moment.
It is in keeping with this that Trump and his cabinet—unread, ignorant of and indifferent to the Constitution and law—continue to claim against a surfeit of perfectly legible video evidence that the I.C.E. officers who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti acted in self-defense against terrorists. It amounts to giving the middle finger, a gesture of which Trump and his people are fond, to anyone proposing to consider events rationally, to say nothing of legally. People with sharp minds have taken to quoting the famous line from Orwell’s 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” What the British writer presciently imagined 77 years ago is now a bitter reality in America.
I come to D.H.S. and its evident determination not to turn back in the face of this crisis but to worsen it. Since mid–2025 It has been running aggressive advertising campaigns to recruit many thousands of new I.C.E. agents. These are long on “patriotism,” “national security,” and the presence of “dangerous criminals” in American cities. “This is a defining moment in our nation’s history,” Kristi Noem said as she introduced the new recruitment drive. “Together, we must defend the homeland.”
It seems to me time to conclude that America is on the way to its own version of fascist ideology—unmistakably the apple pie variety—if its purported leaders do not already impose it in all but name.
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Does this mean America is unraveling, as Charles Homans seems to think? I question this. The Times, ever a reflection of orthodox thinking and the mythologies by which America lives, is forever casting these United States and their citizens as virtuously democratic but prone to temporary departures requiring correction. I propose we consider whether Trump—setting aside his narcissism, his bottomless need to self-aggrandize, his compulsive bullying, and his failing mental faculties—is once again merely bringing out what has been in implicit in “the American experiment” all along.
Straight off the top, we ought to consider how it is Sinclair Lewis published a novel about the dangers of emergent fascism in 1935 and nine decades later it remains a grave concern. Lewis flicked at the Klan as a manifestation of fascistic tendencies in the American character, but he did not explore the implicit thought. He is said to have modeled Buzz Windrip in part on Huey Long, the Louisiana governor and subsequently a senator in the 1920s and 1930s, who was revered as a left-of–Roosevelt populist but also feared as a fascistic demagogue given to violent excess. Long was assassinated in 1935, precluding his bid to challenge F.D.R. in the 1936 election.
The genocide on which America was founded, the Salem witch trials, the anti–Catholic paranoia of the 19th century, closer to our time the McCarthyist 1950s: I do not see any denying there is a legible strain of intolerance in America that dates to the 17th century and has risen and submerged at intervals ever since. You see in this a fear of difference and a tendency to count all others as Others. And with this intolerance, a pronounced will to power as its natural companion. To draw a distinction Nietzsche insisted upon (and which the Reich ignored when it appropriated parts of his thought), we Americans prefer Macht to Kraft, power to strength.
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As earlier argued, “fascism” and “fascist” have rolled too readily off the tongues of Trump’s opponents since he first occupied the White House in 2017, notably but not only among liberals with undisciplined minds and too poor a grasp of history. But these past months of increasingly aggressive I.C.E. operations in U.S. cities—before the mess in Minneapolis there was Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Charlotte, Portland (Oregon)—more or less force a reconsideration upon us.
Certain features of the fascist state have long been in place. The unity of the state and major economic structures is an obvious case. One has not been able to tell for many years where the federal government ends and the most powerful American companies begin. During his second term, Trump has ordered direct federal investments in corporations deemed essential to America’s economic future. The National Security Strategy issued in November makes explicit the regime’s view that “the critical and emerging technology sectors that will define the future” are to be cultivated as a source of national power. “Fascism should more properly be called ‘corporatism’ because it is the merger of the state and corporate power,” Mussolini is reputed to have said on numerous occasions. Such a merger is all but complete in the United States, which appears to be precisely the Trump regime’s plan.
I am also concerned here with characteristics of fascism that are other than structural. I am concerned with what Il Duce called matters of spirit and ethics.
Here is how Mussolini began “The Doctrine of Fascism,” his famous 1932 essay:
Like all sound political conceptions, Fascism is action and it is thought; action in which doctrine is immanent, and doctrine arising from a given system of historical forces in which it is inserted, and working on them from within. It has therefore a form correlated to contingencies of time and space.
How accurately these lines describe the modus operandi of the Trump regime. The regime’s ideology is immanent—unstated, implicit in what it does. What it does is dictated by the immediate circumstances of any given moment in any given place. Prerogative is ever to be preserved.
And further on in Mussolini’s essay:
The State, as conceived and realized by Fascism, is a spiritual and ethical entity for securing the political, juridical, and economic organization of the nation, an organization which in its origin and growth is a manifestation of the spirit….
The Fascist State expresses the will to exercise power and to command. Here the Roman tradition is embodied in a conception of strength. Imperial power, as understood by the Fascist doctrine, is not only territorial, or military, or commercial; it is also spiritual and ethical….
Three years after Mussolini published “The Doctrine of Fascism” he ordered the invasion of Abyssinia, Haile Selassi’s Ethiopia. And precisely as he had recently written, this was about more, far more, than territory. Il Duce understood that Italians were desperate for leadership in the tumult of the interwar years—decisive leadership and displays of pride abroad as well as at home. So did he intend the war in Africa as an appeal to a national spirit and a display of the state as its vessel.
You see the same vacuum of leadership in It Can’t Happen Here, wherein characters exclaim, “A war might be a good thing,” and “A war—any war!” And it is hard to miss the extent to which the Trump phenomenon is an echo of Lewis’s novel and the Italy Mussolini had created by the time the book came out. Trump fills a void among very many Americans. He does this not by appealing to reason but to its opposite. Read the D.H.S. recruitment advertisements to which I have linked: Are they not invocations of unreason aimed at people desperate for a leader who sets them loose?
It is this, the irrationality of Trump’s movement, that I.C.E. now puts thoroughly and therefore fearfully on public display. This, the dispensing of any resort to reason, is what Trump and all the manifestation of his regime, I.C.E. but one of them, have most fundamentally in common with Mussolini’s Italy. Anyone who watches an I.C.E. or Border Patrol operation via one of the numerous videos available on social media will see immediately that many of these agents brim with hatred and ressentiment, the collective feeling of inferiority and suppressed envy that has long motivated disadvantaged social groups to act. Once this is understood, it should be plain that the excesses of federal operations of this kind are subliminally intentional: They are meant as “theaters of power,” to take Charles Homans’s phrase—as expressions of a righteous irrationality devoted to the primacy of power and “command.”
Law is fundamentally rational, to put this point another way. And as Trump recently made clear, he has no use for law, only his own “morality”—his word, unmistakably, for Mussolini’s “ethics.” So can we understand that the abuses of law and civil rights one sees in the videos are also purposeful. Law does not count: The power of a masked, heavily armed I.C.E. agent is what counts.
Mussolini was notably given to the manipulation of images, as students of Fascism, capital “F,” often remark. He understood the use of imagery and also gesture to control the popular consciousness. This, too, is Trumpian. Greenland, the annexation of Canada, the incessant threat of tariffs, “the Gulf of America”—what is all this if not the step-by-step construction of an image of limitless power? There are—the accepted figure at the moment—roughly 14 million illegal immigrants in the United States. Is there some question that these door-to-door I.C.E. and Border Patrol operations can possibly remove all of them? The thought is preposterous. It is the imagery of I.C.E. in action that matters.
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“Fascism,” the word, can be distracting when used in the American context. It conjures images of a certain time and place and so can mislead people into thinking that what occurred in Europe a century ago cannot occur in America now. This is not a useful perspective. This moment in American history has no precedent, however many its similarities to past passages in the history of others. Fascism: The term needs to be… what is my word?… purged, reconstituted so that it is of use to us in the third decade of the 21st century.
Fascism in America does not wear black shirts, jodhpurs, and jackboots. No, the iconography is very different. It runs to camouflage uniforms, cowboy hats with boots to match, and—a fashion among Trumpians—crucifixes. This is the look of the apple pie variety, a point that ought not be missed. It is a sui generis phenomenon but no less dangerous for this. Its ideology is immanent in what, day by day, it does. Kristi Noem has it right about one thing, remarkably enough. This seems to be a defining moment in American history.
A final note. The plot of It Can’t Happen Here explodes as increasing numbers of Americans—liberals, what we used to call Rockefeller Republicans, and so on—see Buzz Windrip as the dictator he is and stand against his egregious excesses. In time these people, disappointed followers among them, form a movement called the New Underground. There is well-organized resistance, mass arrests, lots of people exile themselves in Canada. Eventually a civil war breaks out. A great many people commit themselves to it. And so the novel ends.
Lewis’s title is intended ironically, a reference to the complacency to be found among many Americans, in his time as well as ours. He also seems to suggest that what can’t happen here can indeed happen, but it cannot endure in the face of disillusion and a mobilized resistance.
When I finished rereading his novel, having read it long ago, before I was ready for it, I turned the title another way. Anti-fascism, as many people have pointed out, is more authentically American than apple pie fascism. But are Americans today capable of drawing together in any kind of organized resistance of the New Underground kind? Can such a thing happen here? I considered this question in a previous essay in these pages, and the wistful uncertainty expressed there remains with me.
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A previous essay, touching on some of these themes, appeared earlier in Global Bridge.
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Patrick Lawrence
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.