1. Introduction
The present paper aims to analyze the governmental conduct and rhetoric of the Trump Administration (external link) based on theoretical repertoires on German Nazism (1933–1945) and Italian Fascism (1922–1945), focusing on the production of “enemies” as an organizing axis of politics. More specifically, it examines the discretion in the execution of immigration policies and the arbitrary rhetoric of the U.S. president, as well as how these conducts demonstrate an affront to Human Rights.
Methodologically, the objective is not to assert that Trump is a Nazi-fascist or that his administration is Nazi-fascist, but rather to delineate traits and practices that bear similarities to patterns described in the literature on fascism and Nazism, particularly regarding the sacralization of the nation, the construction of the internal enemy from a racial and/or ideological perspective, and the suppression of dissent. The analysis therefore focuses on political language, statutory provisions, and governmental actions that victimize immigrants and strain the legitimacy of the opposition and the press by turning criticism and dissent into a moral and existential threat. This article used artificial intelligence as a tool for textual revision and reference organization.
The qualitative analysis is conducted through a literature review, taking as empirical objects the statutory provision 8 U.S.C. § 1357, the ICE Tip Form, a collection of journalistic articles describing ICE actions, and governmental actions and statements by Trump. To this end, the essay draws on Michael Mann as the main reference to frame the fascist logic of identifying the “traitor” and the “foreigner” as enemies of the nation, as well as Wendy Brown to understand the contemporary articulation between cultural resentment, the moralization of political conflict, and religious alliances that operate as a seal of legitimacy and social discipline. Regarding the approach to the Nazi scenario, taking the Gestapo as an object of counterpoint to ICE (specifically the statutory provision 8 U.S.C. § 1357 concerning its powers and the ICE Tip Form), Robert Gellately provides the theoretical foundation for this research.
The guiding hypothesis of the text is that the Trump administration, even without fully reproducing historical Nazi-fascism, reactivates authoritarian repertoires compatible with the dynamics described by Mann and Gellately in their respective analyses: politics as moral warfare, the nation invested with a quasi-sacred meaning, the reclassification of the adversary (whether immigrant, opponent, or the press) as an obstacle to be neutralized rather than a legitimate interlocutor in a democratic contest, and arbitrariness in the actions of governmental agents regarding race and ethnicity.
The topic directly connects to human rights by highlighting tensions between state discretion, equality, due process of law, and protection against arbitrariness, allowing the identification of relevant convergences regarding the violation of fundamental democratic principles, such as legal equality, individual liberties, and political freedoms.
2. Racialization of the Enemy
Associating fascism with historical periods subsequent to the Italian experience requires extreme caution and reasonableness, at the risk of falling into anachronism. The statements of visibly authoritarian figures in contemporary politics, such as Donald Trump, bear specific similarities to fascist and Nazi rhetoric. These shared rhetorical features generate concerns and, consequently, comparisons.
Even in a cursory analysis of movements such as Trumpism, it is possible to identify elements previously observed in the history of authoritarian regimes. The rhetoric that exploits the fear of socialism—present both on twenty-first-century social networks and among the motivations of elites supporting fascism—is the most basic and explicit example (Mann, 2008). However, when one realizes that the enemy transcends the merely ideological realm into the ethnic or racial sphere, certain connections become more plausible:
Some fascists attacked Jews, but most struck at the socialist “enemy,” also identified here as “Slav” or Slovene, hence “foreign.” Alto Adige fascism was also strong, this being the earliest regional administration captured by the fascists (...) In these two regions, we find fascists endorsing ethnic politics, including discrimination against other ethnic groups, which could be accompanied by violence with a view to ethnic cleansing, pressuring minorities to flee (Mann, 2008, p. 149).
When Trump’s repertoire relies on discourses such as that of the immigrant who “steals jobs” and is responsible for the crisis, or “America for Americans,” the connection with fascist elements becomes more palpable. However, it is possible to scale up comparisons within the same topic and analyze actions that are not only more allusive, but also, and above all, more alarming. Beyond rhetoric, immigrant detention policies executed by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents—as the federal agency enforcing immigration and customs policies, operating in the investigation, detention, and removal of immigrants—bear relevant similarities to key points of Italy’s 1938 racial laws.
It can be stated that the persecution of immigrants in the United States can take forms of coercion and intimidation with severe impacts similar to Regio Decreto-Lei n.º 1728/1938. While Italian laws provided for fines for marrying foreigners without prior authorization, prohibited interracial marriages, and imposed various civil and economic restrictions on Jews (Regione Emilia-Romagna, Assemblea legislativa, [n.d.], n.p.), ICE agents go further by targeting workers with alleged traits deviating from the Caucasian norm, assaulting ethnic minorities in the streets, and deporting individuals with Latino phenotypes or names, even when equipped with the necessary documentation to reside in the country.
Reports to this effect were published by the newspaper The Guardian, in which individuals anonymously share how they were stopped and questioned by ICE agents, having their immigration documents demanded without apparent justification.
Statutory provision 8 U.S.C. § 1357 grants ICE agents the power to interrogate aliens or persons “believed to be aliens” (translation of believed to be an alien). The vague hermeneutics of the rule, in speaking of those “believed to be,” allows for discretionary leeway on the part of the agent, enabling the authority to select “who” will be stopped; that is, against whom they will act within the limits permitted by law. This type of imprecision can provide a normative basis for possible racial profiling.
Along these lines, Gellately describes persecutory patterns on the part of Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) agents in the German Nazi regime, from 1942 onward, regarding the presence of ethnic-racial profiling in the enforcement of investigation and detention policies. Authorities carried out warrantless searches in Jewish homes under allegedly unfounded suspicions of secondary charges, which facilitated the planting of evidence, such as enemy propaganda materials. For the Gestapo, a mere accusation against a Jew was sufficient prerogative to render them a suspect and presumably involved in violating racial regulations (Gellately, 1990, p. 204-205). In short, the accused’s membership in the ethnic-racial group was enough to taint the conduct of the authorities.
Still within the Nazi context, the convergence of ICE practices extends to the Gestapo’s role in encouraging community surveillance and its reliance on tip-offs from the population itself to locate targets. Gellately (1990, p. 129-130) describes the Gestapo’s lack of resources and the impossibility of omnipresence when surveilling the majority of the population; therefore, some participation by ordinary citizens was necessary in the exercise of policing, through the voluntary provision of information.
In the United States, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,the governmental body to which ICE is attached, provides a tip form with optional identification of the whistleblower: the ICE Tip Form,which explicitly includes the possibility of monetary payment for information or evidence pertinent to investigative proceedings (UNITED STATES IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT, 2026).
It is worth highlighting that the comparisons above concern material effects on racialized bodies, not legal regimes in the strict sense. Despite the observed similarities, caution is essential when associating contemporary movements with fascism and Nazism proper, at the risk of anachronism and conceptual inflation. Therefore, the aim is not to label the Trump Administration as Nazi-fascism in the strict historical sense, but rather to operate through analytical approximations based on traits and repertoires described in the literature.
Among the interpretive possibilities, I adopt as a central axis the idea of a “Nazi-fascist spirit” as an agent. This choice is justified by the historically situated character of Mussolini's movement, marked by nationalist mobilization and the attempt to unify a stratified social body around a political identity constructed by the nation and, in certain contexts, by ethnic markers. Just as the legal and juridically legitimized practices of the Gestapo in the Nazi regime find similarities in the actions of ICE, which are likewise grounded in legal norms.
Within this framework, the “Nazi-fascist spirit” is understood as a core of political practices and dispositions that can remain latent and resurface when favorable social and institutional conditions arise (crises, social insecurity, polarization), reactivating well-known repertoires of exclusion, enemy construction, and the curtailment of dissent. This text prioritizes the analysis of how, in the case of the Trump Administration, certain repertoires are articulated as a dynamic of totalization and the production of the “internal enemy,” with direct effects on the opposition and the press as forums of contestation.
3. Faith and the enemy
This section analyzes Trump's rhetoric and conduct as a tendency toward ideological totalization and the curtailment of dissent, emphasizing attacks on the press and political opponents, and examining how the mobilization of religious discourse connects to this sphere. Initially, it is worth citing an excerpt from Mann (2008) to draw broad initial comparisons.
Some say that fascism was “the religion of Italy,” “the religion of the nation,” the “militia of the nation”; its enemies were “traitors to the nation.” They maintain that the movement emphasized faith, symbols, and rituals, the cult of martyrs who died for the purification of the nation (...). But fascist leaders were perfectly aware that an authentic religion existed in Italy, believing in miracles and filled with fear and reverence for realities foreign to matter. And it was not fascism, but Catholicism. They thus attempted to weave fascist rituals into its sacred mantle. (Mann, 2008, p. 140)
The excerpt brings forward different aspects that can be analyzed through the conduct of Donald Trump. Beyond the instrumentalization of religion, in which we observe Christian leaders who, according to Wendy Brown in Nas Ruínas do Neoliberalismo, contradicted fundamental doctrinal values by allying themselves with a vulgar figure like Trump (I do not intend to dwell on the incongruity of values, but merely on the fact that the alliance occurred). The phenomenon described by Brown (2019, p. 112) as resonance describes how evangelicals identified with Trump because they were “disdained by cultural elites and attacked by worldly forces.”
And Trump’s rise, still according to Brown, allowed churches to make use of “religious freedom” through the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to persecute LGBT people, engage in activism against the legal termination of pregnancy and same-sex marriage, among other ways of imposing doctrine onto general society. And when questioned or challenged, the card of “religious intolerance” was played.
In a parallel with Mussolini's Italy, according to Mann, the Vatican was already discreetly flirting with fascism from the early 1920s. This alliance was solid, as described by Mann: “Once the fascists had recognized the legitimate institutional interests of the Church, the Vatican came to prefer them over democracy, if democracy included socialists” (2008, p. 174). Beyond mere preference, Pius XI expressed gratitude to Mussolini for putting “social Catholicism” into practice. The alliance between Mussolini and the Catholic Church, as is well known, culminated in the creation of the State of Vatican City on February 11, 1929, with the signing of the Lateran Treaty.
Although the instrumentalization of religion is an important axis, Mann’s excerpt is not limited to it. The decisive point, for the purposes of this section, is how fascism seeks to sacralize the nation and, in doing so, redefine political conflict. Opponents are no longer mere legitimate adversaries, as they are framed as “traitors to the nation.” This logic organizes the identity of the “true people” while providing a symbolic justification for the curtailment of dissent and the production of internal enemies.
It is within this context that it becomes relevant to observe, in the Trump Administration, the recurring construction of opponents as an existential threat to the country and the systematic attack on the press as a forum of contestation, often treated as an enemy or as part of a conspiracy against the “nation.” Legitimate opposition is not recognized as a possibility, as it is treated as a threat to the nation, which opens the way for the normalization of punitive solutions. A concrete example is the news report documenting Trump calling for the arrest of the Mayor of Chicago and the Governor of Illinois, both Democrats, for allegedly failing to “protect” ICE agents, shifting political confrontation toward the rhetoric of incarcerating opponents.
In this same movement of constructing the “internal enemy,” the figure of the “traitor” also falls upon those actors responsible for documenting and contesting the official version of facts. When the press is viewed as part of the problem (‘fake news,’ ‘untruths,’ ‘conspiracy’), political conflict is no longer a legitimate dispute, since it becomes a threat to be neutralized. For the Trump Administration, this logic extends beyond verbal attacks, tending to advance to the institutional level through administrative measures, economic pressure, and the use of the judicial system as a tool to intimidate and discipline newsrooms.
This sacralization of the political also appears as staging and public ritual. An emblematic episode occurred in June 2020, during the dispersal of protesters in Lafayette Square: Trump walked to St. John’s Church and posed with a Bible, in an act widely interpreted as a symbolic staging of authority. The gesture encapsulates what Mann describes as an attempt to “weave” political “rituals” into the mantle of the sacred. The Bible, a symbol of faith, is manipulated as an instrument of authority, signaling who occupies the position of the nation's “guardian.” The episode of the photo with the Bible indicates how the Trump Administration seeks to cloak political authority in signs of the sacred, producing a staging of moral and national belonging. However, this relationship with the religious is neither stable nor disinterested. It functions as long as the religious sphere operates to legitimize the leader and his narrative.
When, on the contrary, religious authority shifts the focus to ethical demands (mercy, protection of minorities, limits on power), the response tends to be one of disqualification and pressure, as if pastoral criticism were a political affront. It is through this lens that one can understand the episode in which Trump publicly attacked Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde following her sermon, demanding an “apology” and framing her as an adversary by calling her a “so-called bishop” and a “Trump-hating radical leftist.”
Among more recent events, Trump went even further by sharply criticizing Pope Leo XIV, calling the pontiff “weak” and “terrible on foreign policy.” On that occasion, the Pope had condemned the manipulation of God's name to justify wars and called for an end to armed conflicts. After attacking the Pope, Trump posted an artificial intelligence-generated image on his Truth Social account, with an aesthetic faithful to American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny; in the artwork, Trump wore the robes of Jesus Christ while healing a sick person, with light emanating from his hands, and in the background a raised American flag was accompanied by fighter jets, fireworks, and the Statue of Liberty. Following the backlash condemning the act as “blasphemous,” the president deleted the post, claiming that it was merely a reference to the work of Red Cross doctors.
In summary, the analysis conducted allows us to understand Trump’s rhetoric as a dynamic that seeks to totalize political identity based on the sacralized nation, the cult of leadership, and the production of a “true people” pitted against internal enemies. Thus, dissent, generally understood as an ordinary component of democratic contestation, is transformed into a moral and existential threat, making intelligible the naturalization of punitive solutions against opponents and the transformation of the press into a political target, whether through discursive delegitimization or institutional pressure.
The sacralization of the political, in turn, appears both as staging and as method: when the sacred legitimizes governmental actions, it is incorporated as a ritual of authority; when it imposes ethical limits, it is attacked and constrained. Therefore, this section highlights a repertoire of practices and dispositions that, by eroding the legitimacy of the opposition and public criticism, brings the exercise of power closer to the authoritarian patterns described in the literature.
4. Human Rights in the world’s largest democracy
This section summarizes the aforementioned cases involving practices of the Trump administration and remarks by the president himself, seeking to point out direct violations of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which itself emerged as a response to the horror experienced under twentieth-century authoritarian regimes, particularly Nazism, and during the Second World War.
Starting with Article 7, which addresses equality before the law: equal treatment without distinction. And, alongside it, Article 9, which states that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile (ONU, 1948). These provisions are not fully respected in the current context of the United States, given the discretion observed in the legal mechanism legitimizing ICE’s actions, and potential profiling based on race and ethnicity.
Trump’s conduct in publicly calling for political arrests, attacking religious figures who do not legitimize his governmental actions (and who ground themselves in their own doctrine to do so), as well as his attacks on the press, run counter to Articles 18 and 19: respectively, the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, and “(...) freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” (ONU, 1948).
Dissent is entirely legitimate, as are any disagreements on Trump’s part regarding opponents; the issue is that his role as the leader of a nation of immense material and formal power carries a heavier burden and, consequently, demands responsibility in his speech. The type of verbal violence employed in Trump’s attacks goes beyond the healthy realm of agonism and reflects precisely the spirit observed in authoritarian experiences.
FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
This article began from a simple methodological premise: to avoid the shortcut of labeling. It was not asserted that Donald Trump is a Nazi-fascist, nor that his administration constitutes a Nazi-fascist regime in the strict historical sense. The objective was more limited and, at the same time, more demanding: to identify, in governing conduct and in the leader’s rhetoric, traits and repertoires that the literature describes as core components of Italian fascism and German Nazism—twentieth-century authoritarian processes—to examine how such elements reappear, adapted, within a contemporary context that calls itself democratic, and, consequently, to highlight how the conduct exemplified here violates Human Rights.
The analytical parallels regarding political sacralization and the repression of the enemy and of dissent gained substance through Michael Mann. In Italian fascism, the “enemy” was not merely an ideological adversary; in various contexts, it was also racialized and treated as foreign, justifying discrimination and coercion with material effects on minorities (Mann, 2008, p. 149). By shifting conflict from the political to the ethno-racial arena, fascism constructed a horizon in which expulsion and the restriction of rights were politically intelligible as the “defense of the nation”.
Similarly, the legitimation of the Gestapo’s conduct, by opening space for arbitrariness and encouraging the community to inform on others, created and maintained a persecutory sphere based on ethno-racial grounds, in which, in addition to fearing governmental actions, the population targeted by these policies also feared the surrounding community. On this point, the Trump administration offers relevant parallels: the figure of the immigrant as an economic and moral threat, the slogan of “America for Americans”, and the hardening of enforcement and detention practices operate as a political grammar that transforms social groups into a public problem, producing concrete effects on racialized bodies.
The comparison proposed here is not between legal systems as equivalents (not least because Italy and Germany made racial segregation institutionally explicit, whereas what is observed in the United States is a situation of vague hermeneutics conducive to discretion), but between logics of producing the enemy and the material effects of coercion and exclusion. Regio Decreto-Lei n.º 1728/1938 institutionalized civil and economic restrictions on Jews, and contemporary American experience points to state practices that, even under a different legal regime, can operate as intimidation and selective restriction of the social and political life of certain groups (REGIONE EMILIA-ROMAGNA, [n.d.]). The Gestapo operated under the German legal order, just as ICE acts under the authority of statutory provision 8 U.S.C. § 1357, which sets precedents for officer discretion based on race and ethnicity.
The second point concerns the sacralization of the political. Fascism was described as a “religion of the nation”, marked by symbols, rituals, and the transformation of opponents into “traitors to the nation”, while simultaneously seeking to weave its rituals into the mantle of an authentic religion, Catholicism (Mann, 2008, p. 140). This mechanism helps explain, in Trump’s rhetoric, the attempt to invest politics with a moral and quasi-sacred meaning: the leader’s authority asserts itself as the guardian of an imagined community (“true people”), while criticism is read as an existential affront. The alliance with religious sectors, diagnosed by Wendy Brown as a resonance between cultural resentments and political identity, reinforces this dynamic.
The religious element, which could operate as an ethical check on power, is reduced to an instrument of legitimation and social discipline, including through the strategic mobilization of “religious freedom” as a moral weapon in political conflict (Brown, 2019, p. 91). The parallel with Mussolini’s Italy, where the Vatican favored the fascists when the democratic alternative included socialists, illustrates how religious alliances can operate as a choice of power against democracy, rather than as an abstract defense of values (Mann, 2008, p. 174).
Finally, the analysis showed that the logic of the “internal enemy” is not restricted to minorities or partisan adversaries. Persecution extends to the press and to forums of contestation, which come to be treated as part of a conspiracy against the “nation”. If fascism needed to name “traitors”, it also needed to control the narrative, which included treating criticism as a threat. Under Trump, this is expressed both in the rhetoric of delegitimization (“fake news”, “untruths”) and in the attempt to respond to political conflict with punishment (or, at least, the expression of a desire for it), when the imprisonment of opponents is naturalized as an acceptable response.
The combination of these elements (the construction of the enemy, arbitrariness against the racialized “enemy minority”, the sacralization of the nation, the cult of leadership, and the suppression of dissent) forms, here, the core of what has been called the “Nazi-fascist spirit” as an agent: a repertoire of practices and dispositions that can reemerge under favorable social and institutional conditions and that, even without fully reproducing historical Nazi-fascism, reproduces structural elements of its logic.
In short, the article argues that Trump does not need to be declared a Nazi-fascist for one to recognize, in his governing conduct, the reproduction of fascist traits described by Mann: the moralization of politics as a national religion, the manufacturing of the enemy and the “traitor,” the instrumentalization of the sacred, and the displacement of dissent into the realm of threat and punishment; as well as the operational conduct of ICE under the Trump administration, which reenacts Gestapo practices, described by Gellately, in the repression of ethno-racial minorities. And, finally, to understand how what is observed in Trump’s United States is an affront to Human Rights in various ways, through examples listed in an initial analysis. Naming these repertoires is a way of bringing precision to the diagnosis and understanding how democracies can coexist with practices that corrode, from within, the boundaries of pluralism and contestation.