The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 17, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

All of the sudden, the word “fascist” has fully penetrated the presidential race. We just learned that a top general under President Donald Trump described Trump as “fascist to the core.” Trump has been threatening to unleash the military on the enemy within, which numerous observers have described as fascist politics. And at an event on Wednesday, Trump uncorked a long, strange, rambling response to all this, in which he said the real fascists are Democrats. Today, we’re taking a different angle on all this, looking at how the American right really has overlapped with fascist movements in the United States throughout our history. We’re talking to David Austin Walsh, a historian and author of a great new book, Taking America Back, which takes a deep look at the history of the far right in this country. Really glad to have you on, David.

David Austin Walsh: Thank you for having me.

Sargent: Let’s start with Trump’s appearance at a Fox News town hall on women’s issues, which had an all-female audience. He responded to criticism of his recent threat to use the military on the enemy within this way.

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): And it is the enemy from within. And they’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists. And it’s like ... the more difficult part ... you know, Pelosis, these people are so sick, and they’re so evil. If they would spend their time trying to make America great again, we would have ... it would be so easy to make this country great. I heard about that, they were saying I was threatening. I’m not threatening anybody. They’re the ones doing the threatening. They do phony investigations.

Sargent: Let’s clarify again that the prosecutions of Trump are based on evidence. They’re in keeping with the rule of law. There’s zero evidence that President Biden or Vice President Harris have directed any of them. They’re being overseen by judges and heard by juries. That aside, David, what do you think of the fact that Trump called his opponents fascists while reiterating that the enemy within must be targeted and purged?

Walsh: There’s a tremendous irony in how Trump has expressed himself here. He has in the past called his domestic critics “fascists,” “communists,” “Marxists.” He’s also used terms like vermin to describe his political opponents. There are obviously residences with rhetoric from fascist and far-right leaders across the globe who have engaged not just in similar rhetoric, but have actually used that rhetoric as the basis for action against their political opponents. What I think is really interesting is how he has reappropriated the term fascism to describe his political opponents. Ever since 2016, there has been a discussion in academic circles—actually a fairly raging debate—about whether or not you can characterize Trump or Trumpism as fascist or fascistic. I agree with many of my colleagues who are historians who say, Yes, that’s a fair term. Vice President Harris just said this the other day that it’s a fair term to characterize Trump. But the usage of fascist by Trump and other Republicans directed against Democrats, directed against their political opponents either liberals or on the left, in and of itself also has an interesting history.

Jonah Goldberg, who was a pundit at National Review for many years—he has now since left the conservative movement—was actually one of the more prominent Never Trumpers in 2016. He wrote a book in 2008 when it was originally published called Liberal Fascism, which is all about how liberals, and specifically Hillary Clinton, are the real heirs of the fascist tradition in American politics and American progressivism is descended to Mussolini. And that’s the language that Trump is tapping into.

Sargent: David, you write in your book that conservatives have historically reacted very badly when described by liberals and leftists as fascists, but at the same time, parts of the American right really did bleed into fascist movements in the U.S. It’s really true that liberals have historically feared the resurgence of fascism in various forms over the decades with some justification. Can you very briefly recap that history for us?

Walsh: After World War II, there was a general sense in America that on the one hand, fascism had been defeated overseas. Germany was defeated. Italy was defeated. Japan was defeated. But there remained this domestic fascist tradition, which you saw either in Jim Crow or among business leaders in the aftermath of World War II. There was all of this anxiety at the time about whether or not a new fascist strain could reemerge and become dominant again in American politics. This is how so many people understood the rise of Joe McCarthy, because this mapped on exactly to those types of anxieties you have.

Sargent: And the John Birch Society too, right?

Walsh: Exactly, yes. The two are very much interrelated. You have Joe McCarthy emerging as this demagogic, extreme right-wing anti-communist figure in the early 1950s. Then of course he completely implodes after 1954. And the John Birch Society, which is founded in 1958,........

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