As we close in on Nov. 5 and Judgment Day for American democracy, the specter of Benito Mussolini’s seizure of power in Italy a century ago has been keeping me up at night.
As we close in on Nov. 5 and Judgment Day for American democracy, the specter of Benito Mussolini’s seizure of power in Italy a century ago has been keeping me up at night. The similarities with where we find ourselves in the waning days of the 2024 presidential campaign are too foreboding, and too frightening, to be ignored. Former President Donald Trump, after all, has all the hallmarks of a Mussolini in the making. Which should be reason enough to make any American with even a modicum of reverence for the U.S. Constitution vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
A fulcrum of Trump’s immediate agenda appears to be his rage against his political opponents whom he calls “the enemy from within.” Referring to the likes of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) as “evil” and “sick people, radical left lunatics”, he said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that they “should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
Let’s let this sink in. The former president is announcing without any ifs or buts that he would be willing to use the U.S. military domestically as his personal goon force against U.S. citizens with whom he wishes to settle political accounts.
He has a ready-made tool at his disposal. There is no reason to believe that if he is re-elected, Trump will not try to avail himself of the Insurrection Act to go after his enemies. This particular statute of 1807 vintage—10 U.S.C. §§ 331-335—allows a president to “call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary” to suppress an insurrection or rebellion, or whatever he might decide to designate as such.
And this time around, you can be sure that there will be no one in the administration like former secretaries of Defense James Mattis or Mark Esper, or former White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, to put the brakes, any brakes, on such an abhorrent scheme.
“The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don’t put guys like me . in those jobs”, Kelly told The last November. “The lesson he learned was to find sycophants.”
One such sycophant is almost certain to be Jeffrey Clark, the assistant attorney general whom Trump tried but failed to install as the head of the Justice Department after losing the 2020 election. Pat Philbin, Trump’s deputy White House counsel testified this past March before the D.C. Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility that when he told Clark in early January 2021 that attempts to overturn the outcome of the election would lead to “riots in every major city in the country and it was not an outcome the country would accept”, Clark replied: “Well, Pat, that’s what the Insurrection Act is for.”
Why does all this bring Mussolini to mind? Because the execution of such a Trumpian second term agenda would be inspired by and modeled on the Italian fascist leader’s actions after becoming both prime minister and minister of the interior of Italy in 1922. In the latter capacity, he controlled the Italian police and used them to arrest his political enemies—largely communists, socialists, and anarchists—while his black-shirt squadristi, as the Italian fascist paramilitary gangs were known, continued to kill, brutalize, and generally instill a debilitating fear among the Italian public as a whole.
