You have the right to call President Donald Trump a fascist. It doesn’t matter if it’s literally true, even though there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that it is. Trump’s own former White House chief of staff, retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, said shortly before the 2024 election, “He certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.” It’s an opinion and a political label that, even used pejoratively, is still protected speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
But Vice President JD Vance — who reportedly in 2016 fretted about Trump’s potential to become “America’s Hitler” and before the 2024 election unabashedly spread racist lies about Haitian immigrants — has been on a tear since the assassination of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, openly calling for cancellations in the form of firing people for speaking negatively of the late rhetorical pugilist’s legacy. Vance exhorted Democrats, “If you want to stop political violence, stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi.”
MAGA claims of “incitement” are a variant on the “fire in a crowded theater” canard.
Kirk, who often spoke about how deeply influenced he was by the late right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh (who for decades referred to feminists as “feminazis”), was no shrinking violet when it came to labeling his own political opponents. For example, in 2021 Kirk posted to the site then known as Twitter, “Joe Biden is the fascist dictator the left tried desperately to make you think Donald Trump was,” and during a 2023 podcast episode he said Biden was a “corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”
Trump’s virulently anti-immigration (the legal kind, too) deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has also recently characterized heated political rhetoric from the left — like Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, comparing immigration raids to “slave patrols” — as “pure incitement.” Miller also played the “incitement” card back in May when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz likened Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to “Trump’s modern day Gestapo,” which Miller described as “vile anti-American language [that] can only be construed as inciting insurrection and violence.”
A cursory search on X shows dozens of examples of Miller referring to Democrats as “fascists” over the years, but as I’ve previously written, it’s a fool’s errand trying to shame MAGA bigwigs by holding up a mirror to their flagrant hypocrisy. They don’t care, and they relish shameless trolling — like wielding awesome power to police the same words they use all the time.
Nor do Vance, Miller and their allies care that it’s accurate to call Trump a “fascist” based on any number of examples: his attempted self-coup after he lost the 2020 election; his masked, unaccountable secret police prowling American communities manhandling and sometimes disappearing people off the street; his dismantling of previously independent government institutions and stacking them with loyalists; his illegal use of the military to perform law enforcement actions on domestic soil; his relentless hostility to free speech and a free press; and so much more (that you can pore over in this helpful roundup from civil libertarian journalist Radley Balko). Trump provided still more evidence Tuesday, when he told a room of U.S. generals and admirals that they should use American cities as “training grounds for our military” to fight an “invasion from within.”
But again, even if the label weren’t accurate, calling someone a “fascist” isn’t an incitement to violence.
What’s important is to recognize that MAGA claims of “incitement” are a particular variant on the “fire in a crowded theater” canard. This is the mistaken legal understanding that certain expressions of speech endanger public safety — like crying “fire” in a theater where there is no fire and needlessly causing a stampede. (So prevalent is this mistaken belief that even the august New York Times editorial board repeated it in an editorial last week.)
A government that says you can’t call it authoritarian is most certainly authoritarian. But the Supreme Court case that originated the “fire in a crowded theater” hypothetical is instructive for this political moment. In 1917, a socialist activist named Charles Schenck distributed materials that protested the draft conscripting young Americans to fight in World War I. Among other things, he was charged with “conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act” — which sometimes carries a death sentence. The Supreme Court upheld his conviction in 1919, finding that Schenck’s expression presented a “clear and present danger,” with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes likening it to “falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” It was a bad decision, and thankfully, it was effectively overturned 50 years later, in 1969, when the court ruled in Brandenburg v. Ohio that direct incitement to violence was the bar at which provocative speech was no longer protected by the First Amendment. That’s why we’re free to pass out anti-war leaflets today. And it’s why we’re allowed to agitate against the government — even in a time of crisis, like the ones Trump has manufactured right now to justify seizing wartime emergency powers. Today, as the president attempts to criminalize “anti-fascism” and police it as “terrorism” — using nebulous identifiers such as “anti-capitalism” and “anti-Christianity” — it’s as good a time as any to remember that free speech is the enemy of the authoritarian. And a government that says you can’t call it authoritarian is most certainly authoritarian. Robust free speech protections are some of the best things about America — the things that make us truly “exceptional,” if you will, compared with much of the world. Don’t be cowed by MAGA’s speech-policing threats. Just as it has the right to say horrible things, you have the right to call the president a fascist. God bless America.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW, often covering free speech, civil liberties and extremism. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider. 
