Trump’s Latest Bit of Fascist Kitsch: Corporate Loyalty Tests

The price oligarchs must pay for all this, however, is not small. Trump’s pathological attachment to high tariffs, his never-ending threats to destabilize the Federal Reserve, and, increasingly, his demands that corporations bend the knee are all more than these plutocrats likely bargained for. And even as Trump dismantles regulatory agencies whose orderly operations are dictated by the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, the president is introducing a new, much less accountable, much more chaotic regulatory regime dictated by his own whims. As the onetime Fortune editor Bill Saporito wrote last week in The New York Times: “In ripping up numerous business regulations, Trump seems intent on replacing them with himself.”

Goodbye, administrative state; hello, fascist corporatism. To quote Benito Mussolini: “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato” (“Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”). Or perhaps we should say: “Tutto nello Trump, nienta al di fuori della Trump, nulla contro lo Trump.” The shoe certainly fits; according to an April New Republic article by Alexander Stille, Trump’s pathological narcissism makes him a chip off Il Duce’s block.

In his Times piece, Saporito, following The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip, called the new Trump doctrine “state capitalism,” but that’s a euphemism that encourages false equivalence between what Trump is doing and President Joe Biden’s economic policies to promote chip manufacturing and clean energy. Love or hate the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, these were achieved through constitutional means. Trump’s ideas very often aren’t.