Will the Elections Run on Time? Umberto Eco, Mussolini, and the Fascist Game

A companion to “The Performance of Potency.” 

A companion to “The Performance of Potency.” 

1. Eco’s Warning

In April 1995, Umberto Eco gave a lecture at Columbia University that The New York Review of Books published that June as “Ur-Fascism.”¹ Eco had grown up under Mussolini. He begins with a memory: in 1942, at the age of ten, he won a provincial prize in a fascist youth competition for an essay on the question “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” His answer, he recalled, “was positive. I was a smart boy.” The lecture is the work of a man who had been formed by fascism as a child and had spent his adult life learning to recognize it.

Eco’s central claim is that Italian fascism had no coherent doctrine. “Mussolini did not have any philosophy,” he wrote. “He had only rhetoric.” Italian fascism was “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.” That incoherence was not a weakness. It was what allowed fascism to travel. Because it had no fixed core, “the fascist game can be played in many forms,” and the name became “an all-purpose term.” This does not mean fascism was only a style. It had real commitments, to the nation, to hierarchy, to the use of force against internal enemies, and it built institutions to act on them. Its philosophical incoherence did not prevent it from pursuing those commitments through institutions and force.

From this Eco drew his most famous conclusion. Rather than a definition, he offered fourteen recurring features of what he called “Ur-Fascism,” or eternal fascism. He held that these features cannot be organized into a coherent system, and that some contradict one another. But, he wrote, “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.” And he warned that “Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises.”

In “The Performance of Potency,” I examined Trump’s public persona as a trickster who claims for himself a license he denies to everyone else. That essay was careful not to decide whether Trump is a fascist, because its argument about status and authority did not need that label. This post is different, and its thesis can be clearly stated. Trump repeatedly employs political practices that Eco identified as fascist, and his comic persona helps those practices escape accountability. Whether that makes him a fascist in the full historical sense is a question on which historians disagree, and I take it up in section 5. The argument here does not wait on the answer.

2. The Record of Admiration

Start with what Trump has said and done, apart from any theory.

In February 2016, he reposted a line attributed to Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” The account he quoted turned out to be a bot created by Gawker to bait him. When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked whether he wanted to be associated with a fascist, Trump did not disavow the quotation. He said he wanted “to be associated with interesting quotes.”²

In December 2023, at a rally in Durham, New Hampshire, he said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country.” At the same rally he quoted Vladimir Putin approvingly, praised Viktor Orbán, and said Kim Jong Un “is very nice.”³ A month earlier, in a Veterans Day speech in Claremont, New Hampshire, he promised to root out “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”⁴

In October 2024, John Kelly, his longest-serving chief of staff, told The New York Times that Trump “falls into the general definition of fascist,” and that he had said more than once that Hitler “did some good things, too.” The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported that Trump had privately said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” The Trump campaign called these “debunked stories,” and a spokesman called the Atlantic report “absolutely false.”⁵

His admiration for strongmen abroad is long and public. In 2016 he said that if Putin said great things about him, he would say great things about Putin.⁶

Each of these, taken alone, proves less than it may seem to. The praise of Putin, Orbán, and Kim shows an attraction to authoritarian power, which is related to fascism but not the same thing. The Mussolini repost shows a willingness to circulate and defend a fascist slogan, more than a considered admiration for Mussolini. Kelly’s account and The Atlantic’s reporting concern private remarks, and both were denied.

What carries the argument is convergence. Trump has never professed fascism as a doctrine, and Italian fascism had little coherent doctrine to profess. But political commitments and actions matter, and they point in one direction. They include the dehumanization of opponents and immigrants as “vermin” and as “poisoning the blood”; the attempt to exclude whole categories of people from membership; the charge that political rivals are traitors; the demand for personal loyalty; and the rejection of opposition as illegitimate. That convergence is what Eco taught readers to recognize. On that evidence I think the record is clear. Trump plays the fascist game, enjoys its postures, and admires those who strike them.

3. The Features, Read Against the Record

Eco’s list is a set of family resemblances, not a checklist, and a fair reading has to note where the resemblance fails as well as where it holds. Several features fit the public record closely.

Disagreement is treason. “For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason,” Eco wrote. In 2026, the late-night posting from Trump’s account has called for the arrest of Barack Obama, and on one such night it reshared a post calling him a “traitor.”⁷ Opponents are not treated as rivals in a shared enterprise; they are treated as criminals and enemies of the nation.

Fear of difference. Eco wrote that Ur-Fascism “grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference,” and that its first appeal is “against the intruders.” The language of immigrants “poisoning the blood” is the plainest instance in recent American politics. On October 12, 2026, at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump called Somali immigrants “low IQ” and returned to his debunked claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio: “I was right.”⁸ Executive Order 14160 would have denied citizenship to specified categories of children born on American soil: those whose mothers were unlawfully or only temporarily present and whose fathers were neither citizens nor permanent residents. The Supreme Court struck it down in June 2026.⁹

The obsession with a plot. “At the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot,” Eco wrote. For six years the governing myth of Trump’s politics has been that the 2020 election was stolen. According to an NPR count, he posted about it 71 times in the first four months of 2026 alone, every time repeating the false claim that the election was stolen.¹⁰ The plot is the reason for grievance, for retribution, for the claim that only he can restore what was taken.

Enemies at once too strong and too weak. Eco observed that fascist rhetoric makes its enemies “at the same time too strong and too weak.” They are strong enough to steal an election and, in posts from Trump’s account, to plot a coup. Yet the same rhetoric portrays them as feeble, contemptible, and ridiculous: “low IQ,” animals, figures bathing in sewage in AI-generated images. The contradiction is not a flaw in the rhetoric. It is how the rhetoric works, because it justifies both fear and contempt.

Life is permanent warfare. Eco described a movement for which “life is permanent warfare,” and for which pacifism amounts to collusion with the enemy. In September 2025, Trump signed an order giving the Defense Department the secondary title “Department of War.” Hegseth said the department would “go on offense, not just on defense.” Trump said the old name reflected “political correctness” and that the country “could have won every war” had it not been “politically correct or wokey.”¹¹ Since early 2026, the United States has been at war with Iran.¹² Neither a renamed department nor a war establishes Eco’s feature by itself; democracies fight wars. What is distinctive is that the language of war is turned inward. At Quantico in September 2025, Trump endorsed sending the National Guard into Democratic-run American cities, and said he had told Hegseth to use them as “training grounds.”¹³

Contempt for the weak. “Aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak,” Eco wrote, and fascism offers in its place “a popular elitism”: every member of the movement is told they belong to the best people in the world. Military fitness standards do not by themselves show contempt for the weak; every army sets them. What is distinctive is the humiliation that accompanied them. At Quantico, Hegseth required that combat roles return to the “highest male standard.” He denounced “fat generals and admirals” before hundreds of their peers, and told commanders who disliked his approach that they “should do the honorable thing and resign.”¹⁴ The steady public mockery of opponents’ bodies, ages, and infirmities belongs to the same pattern.

Machismo and the ersatz phallus. Eco wrote, "Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality)." And since sex carries its own vulnerabilities, the fascist hero “tends to play with weapons,” which “becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.” The AI images of Trump in a fighter jet, launching missiles from orbit, commanding robot armies, and swinging a hammer over Iran are almost a gallery of Eco’s ersatz phallus. So is his praise of his press secretary’s lips, which move “like a machine gun.”¹⁵ Eco’s account needs no theory of anyone’s inner life. It describes a political form in which sexual display and weaponry stand in for the heroism the movement promises.

Selective populism. Eco’s thirteenth feature may be the most prophetic. In a democracy, he wrote, citizens have individual rights and act collectively through majorities. For Ur-Fascism, “the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common will.” Because no real population has a single will, “the Leader pretends to be their interpreter.” Citizens “are only called on to play the role of the People,” and “the People is only a theatrical fiction.” Writing in 1995, Eco added: “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” He might have been describing a Truth Social feed curated by an aide and pushed out in the middle of the night to millions.¹⁶ And he ended the feature with a test: “Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.” Six years of denying the legitimacy of an election come close to that test.

The rejection of modernism. Eco’s second feature is easily misread. He noted that “both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology.” The modernism they rejected “mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789,” the Enlightenment, which fascism saw as “the beginning of modern depravity.” The hostility to universities, expertise, and science fits that feature well, and the AI feed fits it too: technology in the service of myth rather than reason.

Newspeak. “Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak,” Eco wrote, with “an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” The vocabulary of “lunacy,” “vermin,” “wokey,” and “poisoning the blood” works this way. Each word ends thought rather than starting it.

4. Where the Resemblance Fails

Honesty requires noting the features that fit poorly. Eco’s fascist hero “is impatient to die” and “craves heroic death.” Trump’s own performance emphasizes invulnerability and winning, not self-sacrifice; it promises vindication, not martyrdom. But this says less than it might seem. Eco added that the hero, “in his impatience, … more frequently sends other people to death.” A leader’s attitude toward his own death tells us little about what a movement may ask of others. I make no claim about that here.

Eco’s “cult of tradition” fits only loosely. “Make America Great Again” invokes a lost golden age, but the tradition it invokes is vague, and the movement is more nostalgic than traditionalist.

Nor has an American fascist regime been established. Institutions have held at important points. In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court rejected the birthright citizenship order on constitutional grounds.⁹ Elections continue to be held and contested. Courts, states, and a free press continue to operate. Eco’s list describes a tendency, a game that can be played in many forms, not an achieved state. That distinction matters both for accuracy and for hope.

5. The Debate over the Word

Whether “fascist” is the right name for Trump himself is a question on which serious historians disagree. Robert Paxton, a leading American historian of fascism, long resisted the label. After January 6, 2021, he changed his mind. The invasion of the Capitol, he wrote, “removes my objection to the fascist label,” which now seemed “not just acceptable but necessary.”¹⁷ Samuel Moyn, writing in 2020, before January 6 and before the second administration, argued the opposite case: that the fascist analogy obscures the distinctively American sources of Trumpism and lets the existing order off too lightly.¹⁸ Trump himself rejects the label.

My thesis does not depend on settling that debate. One need not decide whether Trump is a fascist to see that he plays the fascist game. He admires its practitioners, borrows its rhetoric, and exhibits many of the features Eco identified. Eco’s formulation suggests that any single feature can become a seed crystal around which fascism forms. Trump does not exhibit a single feature. He embraces many of them, openly and in combination.

6. The Trickster’s Disguise

Eco warned that “Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises.” The disguise in this case is comic.

This is where the trickster meets Eco’s fascist. Mussolini, as Eco saw, had no philosophy, only rhetoric; his movement held together contradictions that would have broken a system of ideas. The trickster works the same way. His transgressions are often half a joke, and the joke is what lets them pass. The Mussolini quotation was “interesting.” The excrement video was a meme. The “vermin” and the “poisoned blood” were rally talk, the kind of thing he says. The comic frame lets supporters enjoy the posture of fascism while denying that anything serious is happening, and it lets critics be dismissed as people who cannot take a joke. The underlying refrain is “If you can’t take the joke, fuck you.”

The joke does more than entertain. It lowers the cost of acting. A comic persona can make serious threats, and serious policies, easier to dismiss. A threat delivered as a joke is hard to hold to account as a threat, and the persona’s habitual clowning lends even its plainest statements an air of not quite meaning it. But the rhetoric about intruders and poisoned blood did not stay rhetoric. Executive Order 14160 was an attempted exercise of executive authority over who is born a citizen, and it took the Supreme Court to stop it.⁹ Comic presentation does not make the exercise of power less serious, just harder to hold anyone accountable for it.

Mussolini’s most durable legend is that he made the trains run on time. It was largely propaganda. Contemporary observers disputed it. The British journalist Elizabeth Wiskemann dismissed “the myth about the punctual trains.” George Seldes reported that the big express trains carrying tourists were usually “put through to time,” while on the smaller lines “rail and roadbed conditions frequently cause delays.”¹⁹ Fascist efficiency was itself a performance, staged where foreigners would see it. The Trump version drops even that pretense. The chaos is not concealed. A national security adviser adds a journalist to a group chat planning military strikes. Cabinet officers come and go. Hundreds of generals and admirals are flown in from around the world to be told that some of them are fat.²⁰ Much of it seems to cost the performance surprisingly little, because the performance was never chiefly about running things well. Marx observed that the great figures of history appear twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” He was writing about Louis Napoleon, a man playing at his uncle’s greatness.²¹ The clown is not the opposite of the fascist. The clown is the fascist without the trains.

That is not a reassurance. A clown with the power of the state can still coerce, exclude, and harm. Incompetence in administration is no protection against cruelty in policy, and it can make the cruelty more arbitrary.

That brings me to the question in this post’s title. In July 2020, Trump asked on Twitter whether the country should “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”²² In January 2026, complaining to Reuters that a president’s party tends to lose the midterms, he said, “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” The next day his press secretary explained that “the president was simply joking.”²³ This is the comic frame in its purest form. A remark that would alarm anyone as a statement becomes, by announcement, a joke, and the alarm becomes the critic’s failure to get it. The midterm elections are scheduled for November 3, 2026, and there is every reason to expect them to be held. The president has no authority to cancel or postpone them. The Constitution leaves the conduct of elections to the states and to Congress, and federal law fixes the date.²⁴ But a president can still affect the conditions under which an election is held, what is said about it in advance, how its administration is pressured, whether its results are accepted. An election that runs on time is not yet an election that is free, fairly administered, and respected when the votes are counted. Protecting all of that falls to election officials, courts, states, and citizens who take the joke seriously, as what it would be if it were not one.

Eco closed his lecture with a charge. “Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes.” Our duty, he said, “is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances, every day, in every part of the world.” And then: “Freedom and liberation are an unending task.”

That task does not require us to prove what is in a ruler’s heart. It requires us to recognize a game when we see it played, and to refuse the role the game assigns us, as an audience that applauds or jeers on cue. Eco’s People was a “theatrical fiction.” A democracy is not theater. It requires us, with our vital and conflicting wills, to deliberate as equals. Refusing the role of the Leader’s obedient People does not guarantee that authoritarianism will be defeated. Citizens can refuse and still be overpowered. But no democracy survives without the refusal. It has to be renewed, as Eco said of freedom, without end.

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Notes

1.        Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” The New York Review of Books 42, no. 11 (June 22, 1995) https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/, originally a lecture at Columbia University, April 25, 1995. Full text also at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism.html.

2.        “Trump defends re-tweeting Mussolini quote,” NY1, February 28, 2016 https://ny1.com/nyc/bronx/decision-2016/2016/02/28/trump-defends-re-tweeting-mussolini-quote; on the Gawker bot, Washington Examiner, February 28, 2016 https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/?p=1295609.

3.        “Trump praises autocrats, says immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’” NY1, December 17, 2023, on the December 16 rally in Durham, New Hampshire. https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2023/12/17/trump-praises-autocrats--says-immigrants-are--poisoning-the-blood-of-our-country-

4.        “In Veterans Day speech, Trump promises to ‘root out’ the Left,” Boston Globe, November 12, 2023, on the November 11 speech in Claremont, New Hampshire. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/11/12/metro/veterans-day-speech-trump-promises-root-out-left

5.        Jeffrey Goldberg, “Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had,’” The Atlantic, October 22, 2024 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-military-generals-hitler/680327/; “John Kelly says Donald Trump meets the definition of a fascist,” NBC News, October 2024, reporting Kelly’s interview with The New York Times and the campaign’s denials https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/john-kelly-says-donald-trump-meets-definition-fascist-rcna176706.

6.        “Vladimir Putin ‘far more’ of a leader than Barack Obama: Donald Trump,” Business Standard, September 2016. https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/putin-far-more-of-a-leader-than-obama-donald-trump-116090800387_1.html

7.        “The Late-Night Truth Social Storms That Offer a Window Into the President’s Mind,” Wall Street Journal, May 2026 https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-truth-social-late-night-posts-167cb47a, excerpted in Lawyers, Guns & Money https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/05/sundown-youd-better-take-care; on the “traitor” repost, The Daily Beast, 2026 https://thedailybeast.com/sleep-deprived-trump-posts-every-3-minutes-in-unhinged-rampage.

8.        Julie Carr Smyth, “Trump attacks immigrants from Somalia and Haiti while rallying in Ohio for Republican candidates,” Associated Press, October 12, 2026. https://www.ksat.com/news/politics/2026/10/12/trump-attacks-immigrants-from-somalia-and-haiti-while-rallying-in-ohio-for-republican-candidates/

9.        Trump v. Barbara, No. 25-365 (U.S. June 30, 2026), slip opinion https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf, reviewing Executive Order 14160, 90 Fed. Reg. 8449 (Jan. 29, 2025).

10.    “Trump’s Truth Social lays bare narrow obsessions of an extremely online president,” NPR, May 8, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/05/08/nx-s1-5749358/trump-truth-social-online-posts-iran-white-house-ballroom

11.    “Trump signs order to change name of Department of Defense to Department of War,” Defense One, September 5, 2025. https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/09/trump-signs-order-change-name-department-defense-department-war/407962

12.    “U.S. launches new strikes on Iranian targets six months into Iran War,” Arizona PBS, September 3, 2026. https://azpbs.org/horizon/2026/09/u-s-launches-new-strikes-on-iranian-targets-six-months-into-iran-war/

13.    “Secretary Hegseth calls on military to adopt ‘warrior ethos’ or step aside,” TNND/WSET, September 30, 2025. https://wset.com/news/nation-world/secretary-hegseth-calls-on-military-to-adopt-warrior-ethos-or-step-aside-quantico-va-physical-fitness-woke-democrat-national-guard

14.    Remarks of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Marine Corps Base Quantico, September 30, 2025. Official transcript: https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4318689/secretary-of-war-pete-hegseth-addresses-general-and-flag-officers-at-quantico-v/. See also Military Times, September 30, 2025 https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/09/30/hegseth-blasts-fat-troops-in-rare-gathering-with-military-brass/, and PBS NewsHour, “‘Do the honorable thing and resign,’ Hegseth tells military leaders who dislike new approach” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/watch-do-the-honorable-thing-and-resign-hegseth-tells-military-leaders-who-dislike-new-approach.

15.    Missiles launched from space: Mediaite, May 21, 2026 https://mediaite.com/politics/trump-has-averaged-a-whopping-19-truth-social-posts-a-day-in-2026-report; robot armies: Salon, September 7, 2026 https://salon.com/2026/09/07/give-them-nightmares-trump-unleashes-ai-robot-army; the hammer over Iran: TV Insider, September 2026 https://www.tvinsider.com/1285837/donald-trumps-ai-image-spree-turns-him-into-green-lantern-targets-robert-de-niro/; the “KING TRUMP” jet: Axios, October 19, 2025 https://www.axios.com/2025/10/19/trump-no-kings-post-jet-protesters; the press secretary’s lips: Mediaite, “Trump Fawns Over Karoline Leavitt: ‘That Face’ and ‘Those Lips — They Move Like a Machine Gun’,” October 14, 2025 https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/trump-fawns-over-karoline-leavitt-that-face-and-those-lips-they-move-like-a-machine-gun/. These are discussed further in “The Performance of Potency.”

16.    “Trump Aide Drives His Late-Night Truth Social Barrage,” Newser, May 15, 2026, summarizing Wall Street Journal reporting. https://www.newser.com/story/389178/trump-aide-drives-his-late-night-truth-social-barrage.html

17.    Robert O. Paxton, “I’ve Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until Now,” Newsweek, January 11, 2021. See also Lawyers, Guns & Money, October 2024 https://lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/10/robert-paxton-on-fascism-and-trump.

18.    Samuel Moyn, “The Trouble with Comparisons,” The New York Review of Books, May 19, 2020. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2020/05/19/the-trouble-with-comparisons/

19.    Wiskemann and Seldes are quoted in “Mussolini Didn’t Make the Trains Run on Time,” Professor Buzzkill, January 10, 2022 https://professorbuzzkill.com/2022/01/10/mussolini-didnt-make-the-trains-run-on-time/. See George Seldes, Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fascism (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935).

20.    On Mike Waltz’s removal as national security adviser after the group-chat leak, and on the turnover of cabinet officers in 2026, see Erica L. Green, “The disappearing women of the Trump administration,” The New York Times, October 14, 2026 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/14/us/politics/trump-administration-kimberly-guilfoyle-women.html. On the Quantico gathering, see ABC News, September 30, 2025 https://abc7chicago.com/post/what-know-pentagons-mystery-meeting-top-ranking-generals/17909098/.

21.    Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), ch. 1.

22.    Donald J. Trump, post on Twitter, July 30, 2020, as reported by Al Jazeera, “Trump floats election delay, claims voter fraud risks amid virus,” July 30, 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/7/30/trump-floats-election-delay-claims-voter-fraud-risks-amid-virus

23.    “Trump: ‘We shouldn’t even have an election,’” Democracy Docket, January 15, 2026, on Trump’s interview with Reuters https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-we-shouldnt-even-have-an-election/; “White House claims Trump was ‘joking’ when he talked about canceling election,” Democracy Docket, January 2026 https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/white-house-claims-trump-was-joking-when-he-talked-about-canceling-election/.

24.    U.S. Constitution, art. I, sec. 4, cl. 1 (the Elections Clause); 2 U.S.C. § 7 (setting the date for congressional elections as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November).