In an August 25 speech in Rockville, Md., aimed at drumming up support for Democrats ahead of the midterms, President Biden tarred Donald Trump and the MAGA movement with the dreaded "F" word.

“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy,” Biden declared with uncommon fire and verve after his talk was interrupted by a pro-Trump heckler who accused him of stealing the last election. “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the [movement] — I’m going to say something — it’s like semi-fascism.”

Republicans reacted to Biden's characterization of their party leader and his hardcore base as fascist with predictable outrage and umbrage. Some, like conservative Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen, called Biden "a human gaffe machine" and dismissed his comments as "fevered bloviation." Others, like Chris Sununu, the Republican governor of New Hampshire, termed Biden's remarks "horribly insulting" and "horribly inappropriate."

For all of those on the right who may have been offended by the president's candor, I have this to say: This was no gaffe on Biden's part. You anointed Trump as your Führer. You must be held accountable for aiding and abetting his rise to power, and for the existential threat he poses to what remains of our democracy.

If there is anything objectionable about Biden's remarks, it is that the president did not go far enough. There is no need for the modifier "semi" when used to describe Trumpian fascism.

As readers of this column know, I have been warning of the dangers posed by Trump and the movement he has spawned for many years. To be sure, fascism is an emotionally loaded and often misused term. But fascism is as real today as a political and cultural force, a set of core beliefs and a mode of behavior and governance as it was when Benito Mussolini founded the Italian Fascist Party in 1919 and declared himself dictator six years later.

As the celebrated Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1935, fascism “is a historic phase of capitalism … the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive and most treacherous form of capitalism.” Trumpism, along with its international analogs in Brazil, India, the Philippines and Western Europe, neatly accords with Brecht’s description.

Trump and Trumpism similarly embody the 14 common factors of fascism identified by the great Italian writer Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay, Ur Fascism:

• A cult of traditionalism.
• A rejection of modernism (cultural, rather than technological).
• A cult of action for its own sake and a distrust of intellectualism.
• A framing of disagreement or opposition as treasonous.
• A fear of difference. … Fascism is racist by definition.
• An appeal to a frustrated middle class—either due to economic or political pressures from both above and below.
• An obsession with the plots and machinations of the movement’s identified enemies.
• A requirement that said enemies be simultaneously seen as omnipotent and weak, conniving and cowardly.
• A rejection of pacifism. Life is permanent warfare.
• Contempt for weakness.
• A cult of heroism.
• Hypermasculinity.
• A selective populism, relying on chauvinist definitions of “the people” that it claims to speak for.
• A heavy usage of Newspeak—impoverished vocabulary, elementary syntax and a resistance to complex and critical reasoning.

Another instructive definition is the one proffered by political scientist Robert Paxton in his classic study “The Anatomy of Fascism” (Harvard University Press, 2004):

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Paxton hesitated to call Trump a fascist when he initially took office, but has changed his views. In a January 2021 Newsweek article, Paxton wrote:

I resisted for a long time applying the fascist label to Donald J. Trump. He did indeed display some telltale signs. In 2016, a newsreel clip of Trump's plane taxiing up to a hangar where cheering supporters awaited reminded me eerily of Adolf Hitler's electoral campaign in Germany in July 1932, the first airborne campaign in history, where the arrival of the Führer's plane electrified the crowd. Once the rally began, with Hitler and Mussolini, Trump mastered the art of back-and-forth exchanges with his enraptured listeners. There was the threat of physical violence ('lock her up!'), sometimes leading to the forceful ejection of hecklers. The Proud Boys stood in convincingly for Hitler's Storm Troopers and Mussolini's squadristi. The MAGA hats even provided a bit of uniform. The 'America First' message and the leader's arrogant swagger fit the fascist model….

Trump's incitement of the invasion of the Capitol...removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.

According to Paxton, there five stages of fascism:

1. The initial creation of movements;

2. The rooting of the movements in a political system;

3. The acquisition of power;

4. The exercise of power; and

5. Radicalization or entropy, the stage at which movements reach their most extreme heights, or exhaust themselves and fizzle.

We are well beyond the first two phases. We flirted with the third and fourth during Trump’s first term, but our democratic institutions—weak and tattered as they are—were able to resist.

Now, as Trump flirts with another run for the presidency, liberal democracy is again teetering. Both Trump and Quislings like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have raised the specter of civil unrest in the wake of the FBI's search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago golf resort.

There is no American exceptionalism when it comes to Trumpian fascism. The menace is upon us. So, kudos to President Biden for speaking out, even if he only got the message half right.

This is a Roundtable Media panel discussion on the wisdom of prosecuting Donald Trump, featuring Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration; Sharon Kyle, co-founder of L.A. Progressive; and Bill Blum, editor and founder of Blum's Law.

What will the findings of the Mar-a-Lago raid mean for Trump's future? A panel of experts joined Roundtable to analyze the incident's legal and political implications. In this segment, they focus on the politics of the raid and the fallout of any subsequent prosecution.

Bill Blum argues that the course of events will be historic in any event, possibly effecting an irreversible rift in American politics.

"Legally, there is a debate among legal scholars and practitioners about whether or not the country can withstand a prosecution," he says. "I think that the greater danger is not prosecuting him."

"I don't know what case will be brought against Donald Trump, if any," he continued. "But I think there's very good reason to investigate him and, if warranted, to charge him. That will have political ramifications, but that's inevitable when any high-profile person is brought to justice."

Sharon Kyle sees the potential prosecution as both a legal and political issue with high stakes for the credibility of the country's legal institutions—and the idea that nobody is above the law.

"If we allow this precedent to go unchecked, we further erode this country's confidence in our so-called democracy and in our justice system," she says.

Watch the video here.

Read the redacted Mar-a-Lago search affidavit and DOJ legal memo here.

"If we allow this precedent to go unchecked, we further erode this country's confidence in our so-called democracy and in our justice system," she says.

Read the redacted Mar-a-Lago search affidavit and DOJ legal memo here.

Watch the video below or at this link.

On June 17 2022, the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom approved the U.S. government's request to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Although Assange plans to appeal the decision, the move brings him one step closer to being sent to the U.S., where he faces trial under an 18-count indictment for conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information. If convicted, Assange faces a potential maximum penalty of 175 years in prison--in effect, a life sentence.

Assange was initially indicted in May 2018, when the Justice Department was headed by former Attorney General and Trump sycophant Jeff Sessions. The indictment has since been amended ("superseded" in the jargon of the law) twice, first in 2019 and again in 2020.

The indictment alleges that Assange conspired with former Army Intelligence Officer Chelsea Manning and others from 2009 to 2011 to obtain and publish national defense information about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Items supplied by Manning and later published by WikiLeaks allegedly included some 750,000 classified State Department documents and cables as well as several CIA-interrogation videos. Manning also allegedly leaked a video of a 2007 attack staged by U.S. military Apache helicopters in Baghdad that killed two Reuters employees and a dozen other people. (The indictment does not concern WikiLeaks' publication of confidential Democratic Party emails related to the 2016 presidential campaign).

Manning was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act of 1917 and other offenses, and was sentenced to serve 35 years in prison. President Obama commuted her sentence in 2017.

From 2012 to 2019, Assange lived in the Ecuadorian embassy in London under a grant of asylum. His asylum status was revoked in April 2019, and he was arrested by British authorities for skipping a bail hearing in 2012 on charges related to a sexual assault case against him Sweden. Although the assault case has since been dropped, Assange remains confined in Belmarsh Prison, a high-security men's institution on the outskirts of London, pending his extradition to the U.S.

Even before Trump and Sessions decided to target Assange, the Obama administration reportedly considered bringing charges against him. Ultimately, however, Obama’s Justice Department opted against moving forward, fearing that prosecuting Assange could place mainstream publishers of leaked information in legal jeopardy.

The Trump administration, animated by the former president's personal vendetta against the press, had no such reservations. In any event, Assange's fate now rests with Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Biden Justice Department. Biden and Garland would be well-advised to drop the extradition request, give Assange credit for time served in British custody, and allow him to go free.

Although Assange is adored by many on the American and international left, who see him as a martyr in the struggle against "deep-state" secrecy and malevolence, you don't have to be an Assange groupie to appreciate the moral, legal and political folly of extraditing him to stage what would amount to a latter-day show-trial.

Personally (full disclosure), I am not--and never have been--an Assange hagiographer. I think he long ago embraced the dark side of right-wing populism. I am, however, a staunch defender of the First Amendment, free speech, and freedom of the press.

Trying Assange on the indictment against him would raise profound First Amendment issues, forcing the Biden administration to draw constitutional distinctions between mainstream publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post and scrappy upstarts like WikiLeaks. Should the Justice Department succeed in taking down Assange, who would be next--The Nation, AlterNet, CounterPunch, Jacobin? The Justice Department should not be in the business of determining which publishers are legitimate and deserving of protection and which are not.

Trying Assange would also violate the public's First Amendment right to obtain important information about the operations of their own government. As Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, observed in a 2019 Washington Post op-ed:

The First Amendment encompasses the freedom to disclose information and the freedom to receive it. In essence, the right is shared by the speaker and his audience — which in this case includes Americans.

This doesn't mean that journalists should get a free pass for actively leaking classified information, but the allegations that Assange conspired with Manning, according to many First Amendment experts, amount to little more than the work investigative journalists routinely do to cultivate sources of information.

Finally, trying Assange would be a profound misuse of scarce resources at a time when the Justice Department has been hard-pressed to prosecute the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, and has yet to bring any charges against Trump for inciting the insurrection.

The real threat to American democracy isn't languishing in Belmarsh Prison. That man has already been punished. The real threat to the future of democracy is preparing to run for president again in 2024, and he has yet to face any legal consequences for his actions.

The court is about to take Second Amendment fundamentalism to a new and even more dangerous level.

If you're looking for someone or something to blame for the mass shootings that have left our schools, streets and communities soaked in blood, don't just point your finger at the deranged punks who pull the triggers, or the NRA and their lackeys in the Republican Party. Save at least some of your ire for the Supreme Court.

In 2008, the Supreme Court sold its soul to the gun lobby. In a 5-4 majority opinion written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia in District of Columbia v. Heller, the court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms.

Prior to Heller, the great weight of academic scholarship as well as the court’s 1939 decision in United States v. Miller had construed the Second Amendment, in keeping with the actual debates of the Constitutional Convention, as protecting gun ownership only in connection with service in long-since antiquated state militias.

In 2010, the court again genuflected to the gun lobby. In another 5-4 opinion in McDonald v. Chicago, this time written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court extended Heller, holding that the individual right to keep and bear arms is “incorporated” by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and is therefore applicable to the states and local governments.

The Second Amendment, as interpreted by Scalia and Alito, thus became the law of the land. The amendment has since been elevated in right-wing circles to the status of holy writ.

Both Heller and McDonald were based on the implausible and perverse judicial philosophy known as "originalism."

Originalism has led the court to enter a legal fantasy world in which the answers to contemporary questions about such matters as voting rights and gerrymandering, union organizing, the death penalty✎ EditSign, abortion and gun control are to be found solely in the meaning that the Constitution had for the Founding Fathers in the late 18th Century. For originalists, the meaning of the Constitution is forever fixed, and can only be altered by constitutional amendments.

As a tool of judicial decision-making, originalism has been around a long time. One of its earliest expressions came in the Dred Scott case of 1857, perhaps the most odious decision ever issued by the Supreme Court, which held that Black Americans of African descent could never be U.S. Citizens. Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation even after the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, is another originalist landmark.

But as an explicit judicial theory, originalism came into its own in the early 1980s. Initially, as popularized by Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese and the late failed-Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, the doctrine asserted that the most important terms and provisions that appear in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights should be understood according to the “original intent” of the Founding Fathers, rather than as broad concepts that acquire depth, content and more complete meaning over time in response to changing social conditions.

When critics noted that the framers of the Constitution were a diverse group and that their actual intentions were varied and often ambiguous, proponents of the doctrine refined their approach. The current version—call it “new originalism”— focuses on the “original public meaning” of Constitutional provisions, which, they contend, can be ascertained from the recorded debates of the founding era and from such sources as late eighteenth-century dictionaries.

All originalists—whether of the old or new iteration—believe that their approach limits the subjectivity of judges and acts as a restraint on judicial activism.

In fact, originalism does nothing of the sort. As Fordham University history professor Saul Cornell, one of the foremost authorities on the history of the Second Amendment, noted in a scathing critique published in 2011 in Dissent magazine:

“[I]f one looks carefully at the murky methodology and dubious practices of new originalism, it is clear that its historical foundations are even shakier than that of old originalism. The new theory is little more than an intellectual shell game in which contemporary political preferences are shuffled around and made to appear part of the Constitution’s original meaning.”

The actual history of the Second Amendment is quite different from the fantasy versions advanced by Scalia and Alito. As the late Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by three of his colleagues, wrote for the minority in Heller:

“The Second Amendment was adopted to protect the right of the people of each of the several States to maintain a well-regulated militia. It was a response to concerns raised during the ratification of the Constitution that the power of Congress to disarm the state militias and create a national standing army posed an intolerable threat to the sovereignty of the several States. Neither the text of the Amendment nor the arguments advanced by its proponents evidenced the slightest interest in limiting any legislature’s authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms.”

Although Heller and McDonald were the products of extreme rightwing judicial activism, they were technically limited in scope, as they dealt with the right to keep guns in the home. Ever since those cases were decided, however, the gun lobby has worked to bring a new test case to the Supreme Court to extend the right to bear arms beyond the home.

The lobby has finally found its vehicle in a new case--New York State Pistol Association v. Bruen-- that will be decided by the end of June, when the court completes its current term.

Bruen was brought by two individuals and the state affiliate of the National Rifle Association to overturn a New York law that places limits on the issuance of concealed weapons permits to carry guns outside the home. Under New York’s regulatory scheme, people seeking such permits are required to demonstrate a special need for protection — “proper cause” in the words of the statute—to qualify. The NRA contends the law is unconstitutional.

After losing in the lower courts, the Bruen plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court, where they are likely to prevail. With the addition of three Trump appointees—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—conservatives now hold a solid 6-3 majority on the bench. No longer constrained by the need for caution and compromise, they are set to dramatically extend gun rights under the Second Amendment.

Originalism was front and center during the oral arguments the court heard in the case last November.

During the arguments, the Justices paid scant attention to the dire consequences of unleashing more guns on the streets and subways of present-day New York City. They instead peppered the attorneys for both sides with questions about the origins under Anglo-American law of the right to carry arms in public places. At several points in the two-hour session, the attorneys were asked to share their thoughts on whether the Statute of Northampton, an act of the English Parliament passed in 1328, banned the carrying of weapons other than by the king’s servants in fairs and markets.

The questioning would have made for an amusing Saturday Night Live or Monty Python skit, but this was no stand-up bit. Commenting on the oral arguments, Professor Cornell told the BBC it was “beyond ironic” that anyone would look to Medieval England for resolution of the case. "It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever to anyone who really understands the complexity of English history. Obviously, that doesn't include many people in the gun rights community or many people sitting on some courts in America."

Should the New York statute be declared unconstitutional, similar measures in California, New Jersey, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and elsewhere will likely fall, with dire and deadly consequences for public safety. Worse still, depending on the scope of the court's ruling, other gun-control laws on background checks and the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines could become vulnerable to constitutional challenges.

The gun homicide rate in the United States is nearly eight times higher than the rate in Canada, and a whopping 100 times higher than in Britain. This year is shaping up to be particularly horrific. As of May 30, the United States had recorded 17,817 deaths from firearms, counting both suicides and unlawful killings, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Gun Violence Archive. We also had recorded 228 mass shootings (defined as an event involving four or more victims).

In any sane democracy, one might expect the highest court in the land to step in and do something to uphold sensible gun-control regulations when given the opportunity. But in fact, our Supreme Court is poised to do just the opposite. Keep that in mind when the next mass shooting inevitably occurs, perhaps in a neighborhood close to your own.