After the shocking events in Minneapolis in recent weeks, an old debate over the nature of Trump and his MAGA movement has changed, as I pointed out at New York:

For nearly a decade, there has been a recurring debate in center-left intellectual circles about whether you could properly describe Donald Trump, his MAGA movement, and the administrations he has led as “fascist.” Such discussions have accelerated since Trump returned to the White House in 2025 and began stretching the powers of his office to target his many enemies, real and imagined. Hardly anyone in either party would argue that Trump is just a regular, old-school conservative, or that the Republican Party has undergone anything less than a major transformation since he came down that escalator in 2015. But have he and his supporters drifted so far from normal politics as to represent something as sinister and, well, un-American as fascism?

Perhaps the most thorough examination of this question I’ve ever read has just appeared at The Atlantic, written by the regularly brilliant Jonathan Rauch, who has previously warned against loose application of “the F-word” to Trump. He’s changed his mind, and concludes that “the reluctance to use the term has now become perverse.” Rauch concludes that Trump is a “fascist president” because he meets 18 different criteria for classic fascist thinking and conduct, ranging from “demolition of norms” and “glorification of violence” to “alternative facts” and “politics as war.” He denies the United States has become a “fascist country” just yet because of the still-viable forms of resistance against Trump’s plans.

Most Americans have a limited interest in political theory and an even more limited recollection, from long-ago history classes or World War II lore, of facts about the European fascist movements of the 1930s. They can’t be expected to care much about how Trump is classified on some spectrum that leads from Ronald Reagan to Benito Mussolini. But now recent events in Minnesota, as crystallized by two viral videos showing U.S. citizens being shot and killed by federal immigration agents, have done more to arouse widespread horror at the the Trump administration’s abnormal modus operandi than all those warnings from experts about creeping authoritarianism or incipient fascism.

Trump’s mass-deportation program, as displayed in Minnesota, plays a prominent role in Rauch’s account of the president’s emergence as a fascist leader:

“Trump has turned ICE into a sprawling paramilitary that roves the country at will, searches and detains noncitizens and citizens without warrants, uses force ostentatiously, operates behind masks, receives skimpy training, lies about its activities, and has been told that it enjoys ‘absolute immunity. …’

“In Minneapolis and elsewhere, the agency has behaved provocatively, sometimes brutally, and arguably illegally—behaviors that Trump and his staff have encouraged, shielded, and sent camera crews to publicize, perhaps in the hope of eliciting violent resistance that would justify further crackdowns, a standard fascist stratagem.”

A picture of fascism in action is worth a thousand words. As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of his inability to precisely define pornography, “I know it when I see it.” Americans who are not blinded by loyalty to Trump or visceral hatred of immigrants or “leftist” protesters saw masked agents execute Renee Good and Alex Pretti and knew they were seeing something that didn’t belong in this country. And efforts by J.D. Vance, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Trump himself to gaslight the country and blame the victims made it all worse.

It’s far too early to tell what will happen next in Minnesota; in other places where the mass-deportation surge is underway; or in Washington, where the shots — an unfortunate but in this case all-too-accurate term — are being called. The president seems to be backpedaling or “pivoting” to a different posture than the belligerence he has shown toward all criticism of mass-deportation efforts up until now. Perhaps there is some strategic retreat underway that will mitigate, if not erase, the horrible images emanating from Minneapolis.

But right now, the video evidence of fascism in action could rival in significance the televised scenes of Alabama state troopers clubbing peaceful civil-rights protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in March 1965. The “Bloody Sunday” when the brutality of that time and place became evident to the whole world was the beginning of the end for the Jim Crow regime that had gripped the South since Reconstruction. Perhaps a “Bloody Saturday” in 2026 can represent the beginning of the end of the fascist threat posed by the MAGA movement and its leader.