Biden, Trump, and “Semi-Fascism”

Biden, Trump, and “Semi-Fascism”

On this week’s episode of The Time of Monsters, a discussion with The New Republic’s Matt Ford about Joe Biden’s criticism of the former president and MAGA Republicans.

Jeet Heer
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Joe Biden has become increasingly frank and forthright in in his criticism of Donald Trump. In late August, Biden Biden spoke to Democratic Party donors, denouncing what he called an “extreme MAGA philosophy.”

“It’s not just Trump,” Biden said. “It’s the entire philosophy that underpins the—I’m going to say something: It’s like semi-fascism.” Subsequently, Biden delivered an important and substantial speech in Philadelphia where he avoided the word “fascism” but detailed the way MAGA Republicans were a threat to American democracy.

Biden’s remarks and his speech have elicited a considerable pushback from the mainstream media, with the president being accused of being inflammatory and partisan.

The New Republic staff writer Matt Ford has written an strong defense of Biden’s deployment of the term “semi-fascism.” I talked with Matt about his article and about the ways in which fascism does (and doesn’t) describe Trumpism.

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Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets. 

Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.  

As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war. 

In these dark times, independent journalism is uniquely able to uncover the falsehoods that threaten our republic—and civilians around the world—and shine a bright light on the truth. 

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Jeet Heer Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.


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