Trump, the Historians, and Fascism
From the moment of his entry into the US presidential elections, Donald Trump evoked comparisons to the history of fascism and Nazism. Historians of twentieth-century Europe found themselves called forth to pontificate on whether Trump was or was not a fascist, and to probe the value of historical comparisons and parallels. This paper seeks to analyse how historians responded to the problem of the portrayal of Trump as a fascist, the challenges of the uses of history in the public sphere, and the social history of the term ‘fascism’ in political debate in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How useful has been the trend to evoke twentieth-century history as a repository of lessons, warnings and parallels for contemporary politics?