President's former aide cites 12 hallmarks of fascism to explain Trump's actions

U.S. President Donald Trump boards Air Force One as he departs for a state visit to Britain, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., September 16, 2025. REUTERS Kevin Lamarque

President Donald Trump’s former White House communications director just explained how the Republican he once served is instead a literal fascist.

“There are 12 chapters in Laurence Rees’s book ... people should know,” Anthony Scaramucci explained in a Tuesday X post. “Spreading conspiracy theories, using us versus them, leading as a hero, corrupting youth, conniving with the elite, attacking human rights, exploiting faith, valuing enemies, eliminating resistance, escalating racism, killing at a distance, stoking fear.”

Explaining that he is not using the term “fascism” hyperbolically, Scaramucci said that he is instead “grounding it in a historical analysis of what leaders do when they want to be authoritarian.” From there, he pivoted to Trump’s attempts — sometimes successful, sometimes not — to put his name and/or face seemingly everywhere in American life, from the Kennedy Center, the US Institute of Peace, savings and investment accounts, his plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, his visa program, national park passes, various airports, battleships, Washington DC panners, a US dollar coin, a proposed $250 bill and inside US passports.

“We didn’t even get to the naming,” Scaramucci said. “He wants his name on the US dollar, inside the passport, and his face on everything the American people touch when they interact with their own government.

He concluded, “Washington wouldn’t have done that. Eisenhower wouldn’t have done that. Reagan wouldn’t. Obama certainly didn’t.”

Scaramucci has emerged as one of the most outspoken former Trump officials who criticizes his former boss. Earlier this month, Scaramucci compared Trump supporters who still back the president to dogs.

“Trump’s approach to corruption is to do everything in the open,” Scaramucci explained on X. “Make it so ridiculous and so inundating that people’s heads spin and then once they’re numb, keep going.”

He added that Trump has successfully buried his ties to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, even though he has failed to comply with congressional requirements for full disclosure, redacted his name from the files and allegedly sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl after Epstein facilitated the asserted crime.

“Yet, Trump masterfully buried the lead on all of it — through a war, through noise, through sheer volume of chaos,” Scaramucci explained. “When you ask voters what they care about, the Epstein files are at the bottom of the list. They want jobs and gas prices they can afford. Trump’s corruption isn’t even on their radar screen.”

He then added that people who oppose Trump should “not underestimate him. He’s sitting at 34 percent approval and he still has 9/10 self-identified Republicans doing whatever he says. He says 'bark'. They say 'woof'. He says 'jump'. How high, sir?”

Scaramucci concluded, “That’s the architecture of power he’s built and it’s more durable than his critics want to admit.”

Speaking with this author for Salon in 2018, Scaramucci expressed some sympathy for Trump supporters, arguing that much of the movement is fueled by economic grievances.

“What I saw was in a generation we went from aspirational working class families, like the one I grew up in, to [desperate] working class families,” Scaramucci claimed. “What I saw is a decline in wages causing some level of economic asphyxiation for a very large group of people. And so Trump being out there, going into those areas, explaining the policies that he’s going to put in place, and then executing on some of those policies. I mean it’s not me saying, it’s just go look at ‘The Wall Street Journal.’”

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