It happened here.

The United States is officially a fascist nation.

Leftists, in the 1960s and '70s, loved to throw around the F-word. Johnson was fascist, Nixon was fascist, Amerikkka was fascist, the cops were fascist. As a history student and the son of a woman who lost her childhood to the objectively fascist collaborationist government of Nazi-occupied France, I could not ignore the chasm between the systemic racism and authoritarian tendencies of the police in this country and the goose-stepping militaristic mania of fascist Italy and Hitler's Germany.

As I passed into adulthood and middle age, however, the United States kept moving right — under presidencies of both political parties. As power increasingly concentrated in the clutches of the executive branch, the Pentagon launched ever more wars of choice with fewer attempts at justification, and the most extreme dystopian nightmares morphed into banal reality, liberalism and leftism became distant memories. Right-wing extremism became normalized in culture, then in the press, and ultimately welcomed in the corridors of power. Torture, political assassinations, lawlessness, unholy alliances between corporate power and the state that was supposed to regulate it, the corruption of the courts, the extinction of the idea that workers ought to expect higher wages and improved working conditions, all were adopted and promoted by Democrats and Republicans alike. The way things were going — the way they have been going — we might someday arrive at full-fledged fascism.

I was determined to study and understand what classic mid-20th-century fascism was and how it came to be so that I could identify it if and when it actually presented itself again.

I got my opportunity to dig into really-existing fascism as an undergraduate at Columbia University, where I was fortunate enough to convince legendary expert Robert O. Paxton to be my thesis adviser, to study under the man who wrote both the definitive history of Vichy and the most useful book on that terrifying, often misunderstood and mischaracterized phenomenon of fascism. Key point: Though clearly right-wing, fascism is less an ideology than a style of governance.

Based on what I learned under Paxton, the U.S. was in danger — the greatest danger of any country — of succumbing to fascism. But we weren't there yet. Our system had distinct fascist characteristics, like kneejerk militarism. ("Thank you for your service" is not something journalists tell soldiers in other countries.) Key ingredients were missing.

No more. We have arrived at Fascism Central Station.

According to Paxton, the motivating characteristics of fascism include:

— A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions. (Donald Trump: "I alone can fix it!")

— The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it.

— Fear of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism (Trump's "radical left lunatics"), class conflict and alien influences (here, illegal immigrants).

— The need for authority by natural chiefs (male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group's historical destiny. (Note Trump's often goofy efforts to exude Churchill-like toughness and masculinity.)

— The superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason. ("I know what I'm doing and I listen to a lot of people, I talk to a lot of people and at the appropriate time I'll tell you who the people are," Trump said in 2016. "But my primary consultant is myself and I have a good instinct for this stuff." He has frequently repeated this sentiment.)

— The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary.

Trump and his MAGA movement fit the bill for the first six mobilizing passions of Paxton's list. During Trump's first term and the beginning of his second, though, there were fewer clear indications of the final three items:

— The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint (my emphases) from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

— The belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external.

— The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success.

Two developments have fulfilled the remainder of the fascism punch list: the unleashing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the gleeful explosion of militarism under this administration — militarizing the streets of American cities with ICE and National Guardsmen, bombing "drug boats" in the Caribbean with no evidence that they mean harm, and kidnapping the president of Venezuela, a shocking departure from the domestic populism beloved by his base that has culminated with the Iran War burning up the Middle East.

Last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act expanded ICE into the highest-funded U.S. federal law enforcement agency, with an annual budget that exceeds $85 billion — more than the total military spending of many nations, including Norway and Denmark. Under Trump's direction, masked, zero-ID ICE goons are America's brownshirts, personally loyal to the president and completely unrestrained to obey the law or due process norms.

Two years ago, the suggestion that a homicide would go uninvestigated in the U.S. would have been dismissed out of hand; this year's high-profile, videotaped killings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota — probably by ICE agents, but it's impossible to know for sure since the shooters have never been identified — have never been investigated by federal, state or local authorities. Armed agents of the government who can murder citizens without fear of legal or professional consequence are a core feature of a fascist state.

ICE, which has killed at least 32 people in custody and has recently been deployed to U.S. airports and even to screen the immigration status of families of Marine Corps graduates, will continue to expand its size and domestic presence.

The public framing and promotional propaganda of Trump's joint war with Israel against Iran provides further evidence for the notion that fascism is a fact of life in 2026 America. This is the first time in modern memory that a presidential administration has gone to war against a major adversary without consulting, much less seeking consent from, Congress or key allies. The fact that neither Trump nor his top officials feel it necessary to rally other nations or even convince a skeptical American public to support the war indicates that this regime has abandoned the final remaining vestiges of democratic window-dressing.

Previous American presidents have positioned their wars and assassinations and coups and other wanton acts of bloodlust as regrettable but necessary acts in pursuit of noble goals: liberating Muslim women, keeping us safe from terrorism, and always the nebulous "protecting American interests." A year into Trump's second term, we have a "Department of War" secretary and his presidential boss releasing one social media video after another bragging about "maximum lethality" and interspersing shoot-'em-up video games with Pentagon footage of U.S. missiles slaughtering people and destroying buildings in a country on the other side of the world. Violence has become its own reward, a beautiful explosion of blood and bone to be savored.

I never thought I would hear of a public prayer like the one Pete Hegseth, a self-professed Christian, led last week: "Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation," Hegseth prayed to his god. "Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy."

This only happens under fascism.

As in Hitler's Germany, Trump's war in the Middle East was the logical culmination of the hypermasculine belligerence that has defined him and his followers. His war, reckless and aimless, is inevitably doomed, and will bring about the downfall of his administration as well as the MAGA movement.

Paxton describes fascism's ultimate self-destructiveness in "The Anatomy of Fascism": "War provided fascism's clearest radicalizing impulse. It would be more accurate to say that war played a circular role in fascist regimes. ... Once undertaken, war generated both the need for more extreme measures, and popular acceptance of them. It seems a general rule that war is indispensable for the maintenance of fascist muscle tone (and, in the cases we know, the occasion for its demise)."

For those of us on the left and the right who applauded Trump's longtime skepticism of foreign adventurism, only to be surprised by the events of the past few months, Paxton again provides the context for where we are and where we are headed. "Hitler deliberately sought confrontation. Did he want war?" Paxton asks rhetorically.

Probably not: "While Hitler may indeed not have wanted the long war of attrition on two fronts that he eventually got, he probably did want a local, short, victorious war in Poland — or at least the public impression of having got his way by a show of force. Every fiber of the Nazi regime had been bent to the business of preparing Germany materially and psychologically for war, and not to use that force, sooner or later, would produce a potentially fatal loss of credibility." Like Hitler, macho Trump felt compelled to blow something up. He hoped for a short, victorious war in Iran. Instead, like Hitler, he now faces a multifront quagmire that threatens to destroy the Western economy — and himself.

The question for us is: Will he take us down too?

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new "What's Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems." He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.

Photo credit: Aaron Burden at Unsplash