Trumpism as Rebranded Fascism: A New Formation for a Fractured Age

Trumpism isn't old fascism reborn—it's fascism recomposed for the digital age: grievance as policy, spectacle as governance, and symbolic violence scaled without constraint. April 2, “Liberation Day,” marked a shift from trade to retribution, rhetoric to ritual. The enclosures are gone—what comes next?

Donald Trump is not a Nazi.
But Trumpism cannot be understood outside the semiotic architecture that has always underpinned fascist formations—grievance turned into identity, enemies turned into policy, spectacle turned into governance.

What’s different now isn’t just the content of this politics. It’s the infrastructure that allows it to form, spread, and sustain itself—not through ideology or institution, but through affective fidelity and semiotic warfare.

Trumpism is not fascism reborn. It is fascism recomposed, in an age where meaning itself has become a battleground.

I. “Liberation Day” and the Politics of Punishment

In the weeks leading up to April 2, 2025, Donald Trump began referring to that date as “Liberation Day.” Commentators braced for impact. The markets wobbled. Foreign leaders issued warnings. The message was clear: this would not be a policy announcement—it would be a symbolic rupture, a dramatic reversal of course for the American economy and its place in the world.

On that day, the Trump administration unveiled a sweeping set of so-called “reciprocal tariffs.” But these were not reciprocal in any meaningful economic sense. They were calculated using a retributive formula: halving the U.S. trade deficit with each country and dividing it by that country’s exports to the U.S., guaranteeing a minimum tariff of 10%. The actual outcome was economically unpredictable but symbolically precise: it declared that the U.S. would no longer play by the rules of interdependence—it would punish those who had, in Trump’s telling, taken advantage of its generosity.

This was not economic strategy. It was ritualized grievance. “Liberation Day” was framed as the moment when America threw off its chains—chains of globalism, of diplomacy, of negotiation—and asserted its dominance through calculated injury.

This logic extends well beyond tariffs. Trump has repeatedly suggested that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state, and has revived the fantasy that the U.S. might simply “take Greenland.” These are not idle provocations. They are semiotic incursions: they naturalize the idea that American greatness means surrounding countries are provisional, absorbable, and properly subject to U.S. will.

This is Lebensraum by suggestion—not through military conquest, but through perceptual annexation and symbolic absorption.

II. The Personification of Systemic Grievance

Trumpism does not explain economic decline or cultural disorientation in systemic terms. It translates vague, collective unease into targeted, personified threats.

This dynamic is ancient. Across cultures, people have long responded to uncertainty and disorder by attaching blame to recognizable figures: neighbors, outcasts, strangers, “the corrupt,” “the impure,” “the possessed.” In many small-scale societies—documented in anthropological fieldwork—witchcraft accusations arise within face-to-face communities where everyone knows everyone else. In these contexts, symbolic violence operates without anonymity, and its consequences, however unjust, are entangled in ongoing social life.

But even this intimacy never guaranteed justice—only proximity. As societies scale up and stratify, the social distance between accuser and accused increases. Blood libel, emerging in medieval Europe, marks a turning point: here, accusers and targets no longer share daily life or mutual visibility. Jews, confined to ghettos and marked as “other,” could be accused en masse of ritual crimes. The accusation required no familiarity, no interpersonal knowledge—only stereotype and systematized fear.

Trumpism operates at the far end of this arc. In today’s digitally fragmented, media-amplified society, symbolic violence no longer requires any direct contact, shared space, or even basic knowledge of the accused. A trans teenager in a different state becomes the target of a national panic. A school librarian is turned into a symbol of indoctrination by people she will never meet. The tools of accusation have become portable, anonymous, and instantly scalable.

What once took a whisper in the village square now takes a keystroke.

Trumpism didn’t invent this transformation. But it is the most effective political formation yet to emerge from the convergence of social alienation, media saturation, and symbolic dispossession.

III. The Erosion of Tacit Consensus

It’s often said that Trumpism wages war on truth. But this is not quite right. The more telling damage occurs at the level of tacit consensus—the unspoken agreements that allow people to treat certain things as stable enough to act upon together.

These include:

These forms of consensus are not epistemological commitments. They are social affordances—the minimal conditions of collective coordination.

Trumpism corrodes this not by replacing it with a new framework, but by eroding confidence in every framework at once. It floods the field with counter-claims, mockery, conspiracy, and dismissal. What’s left is fidelity to tribe rather than belief in the world.

IV. The Internet as an Engine of Symbolic Dispossession

The internet did not invent symbolic violence. But it unleashed it—decontextualized it, accelerated it, and freed it from reciprocity.

Historically, symbolic power—especially the power to define, accuse, exclude—was enclosed within institutions. Law, religion, media, and bureaucracy created hierarchies of interpretation and enforcement. This enclosure was exclusionary, but it also created friction and procedure.

Now, that enclosure has collapsed. Everyone has access to the tools, but no one bears the burden of stewardship.

What was once gossip or ritual is now broadcast globally and memetically weaponized. What was once a muttered accusation in the village square is now a trending hashtag.

Trumpism thrives in this environment—not as a cause, but as a synchronizing field. It does not need coherence. It needs only affective alignment: fear, resentment, scorn, and pride.

V. Absurdity as Tactical Ambiguity

When Trump says something inflammatory or incoherent, he rarely clarifies. He leaves meaning hovering.

This ambiguity is not sloppy communication. It is a method of dispersing interpretive responsibility. The audience does the work of decoding—or refusing to. This allows the effects to accumulate—incitement, resentment, polarization—without any one statement being clearly actionable.

This is semiotic saturation: creating a haze in which speech circulates without anchoring, but always in the direction of domination and fidelity.

Conclusion: A New Semiotic Architecture of Power

Trumpism is not merely a political movement. It is a semiotic regime—an emergent structure of meaning-making, loyalty-building, and system-undermining, made possible by the breakdown of older enclosures and the rise of digital symbolic force.

It redeploys ancient tactics—scapegoating, grievance, purification—but under conditions that maximize their reach and remove their limits.

This is not Nazism, redux. It is something adapted to the present: fascism without uniforms, authoritarianism by meme, expansionism through suggestion, repression through ambiguity.

To respond, we must do more than refute it. We must reclaim the capacity for shared interpretation, rebuild spaces of mutual accountability, and grasp what it means to live in a time when symbolic power has escaped its old containers.

April 2 was called “Liberation Day.”

The real question is: liberation from what—and into what kind of world?

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