On Monday, journalist Glenn Greenwald asked on X, "Is there a single person in DC or media acting as if Literal Adolf Hitler is about to assume power in 2 weeks in order to end American democracy, install fascism, and create a white supremacist dictatorship? Is it possible those who said this for years never believed it?"
You can answer that for yourself. But the fact is, the Donald Trump transition is turning out to be quite ... normal. The president-elect is busy hammering out policy proposals and staffing his administration. Democrats are, of course, criticizing Trump and promising to give some of his nominees a hard time in confirmation hearings. But that is the sort of thing one always sees in transitions from one party to the other. What is absent is the kind of ugly, fevered, frenzied, over-the-top rhetoric about Trump that characterized the campaign.
Remember? Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist. The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called Trump a fascist. Media talkers such as Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski called Trump a fascist. Journalists and academics called Trump a fascist. (Sample headlines from The New Yorker: "What Does It Mean that Donald Trump Is a Fascist?" and The Atlantic: "Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.") For a while, it seemed like everyone on the left with a podcast, TV show or X account called Trump a fascist.
Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden became the focus of nearly nonstop discussion about fascism and Nazism. In the runup to the event, it was entirely commonplace for media commentators to compare the rally to the infamous Nazi rally held at the Garden in 1939. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate Trump defeated in 2016, told CNN that Trump would be "actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939."
The fascist talk got so crazy that ABC News conducted a poll asking voters whether the 2024 candidates were fascists. The result was that 44% of registered voters said Trump was a fascist, 18% said Harris was a fascist and 5% said both were fascists. Only 32% of those surveyed gave the obviously correct answer, which was that neither was a fascist.
In retrospect, perhaps that was the moment -- the poll was released on Oct. 25 -- when the fascist talk jumped the shark. If a large majority of American voters called the major-party candidates fascists -- and a combined 67% said Trump, Harris or both were fascists -- then the concept of fascism had lost any meaning. It was just talk.
Maybe that is why the talk seemed to disappear so quickly after the election. When Trump won not only the electoral vote but the popular vote as well, many looked back on the fascist moment of just a week earlier and asked, "What was that all about?"
It was about defeating Trump, of course, and when it didn't work, it became an embarrassment, certainly for the most fervent fascism talkers. After the election -- and just weeks after calling the Madison Square Garden rally "Nazi-like," Scarborough and Brzezinski traveled to Mar-a-Lago for an audience with Trump. Afterward, they said they wanted to "restart communications" with the incoming president, as if he were a normal political leader and not the fascist they said he was.
Such turnabouts were why Greenwald could look around and note that nobody in official Washington is acting as if all those dire predictions have come true. Instead, it's mostly business as usual. Politicians and media figures are debating whether there should be one big bill or two. Whether tariffs should apply to this or that product. What border security measure would be most effective. No one is acting as if "Literal Adolf Hitler is about to assume power in 2 weeks in order to end American democracy, install fascism, and create a white supremacist dictatorship."
The damage the fascist moment did to our political discourse is hard to measure at this point. Maybe it will become clearer later. But we know that many in media, government and academic circles hurt their own reputations by losing their heads over Trump.
They also demonstrated the limits of their own influence. On Monday, radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Trump about the effect the election has had on the most dedicated anti-Trump voices in the media. "I think they're disrespected," Trump answered. "I think they're not taken so seriously. ... They were totally opposed to me. ... They were opposed to me at levels never seen before ... and I won."
This content originally appeared on the Washington Examiner at washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/3279134/where-did-donald-trump-fascism-talk-go/.
Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner. Email him at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. For a deeper dive into many of the topics Byron covers, listen to his podcast, The Byron York Show, available on the Ricochet Audio Network at ricochet.com/series/byron-york-show and everywhere else podcasts are found.
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