Political conventions are supposed to give the party holding them a polling bounce, but President Donald Trump’s midterm convention has come and gone as if it never happened. From Michigan to Ohio to Texas, Democratic Senate candidates are holding or even growing their leads. And the GOP’s average deficit in the generic congressional ballot has deepened to over seven percentage points.
Perhaps the most visible of these strong polls was the New York Times/Siena poll released Tuesday.
“Likely voters favored Democratic candidates over Republicans by close to 9 percentage points,” the Times reported. “Voters see Republicans broadly as more extreme, more elitist and more corrupt than Democrats, according to the poll.” Remarkably, more voters trusted Democrats not just on the party’s traditional strengths (such as health care) but on “on the two issues that powered Mr. Trump’s 2024 victory: immigration and the economy.”
This bleak vision of a nation besieged by foreigners and infidels works better on the campaign trail and social media than when a movement is in power.
In the latter case, the president has simply failed to deliver on his promise to bring prices down “on Day One” — and in some ways made matters worse. But the Trump White House has largely done what it said it would do on immigration. So why are voters unhappy? Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book, “End Times Fascism,” offers an answer to that question.
After Trump returned to the Oval Office, the administration and the GOP Congress gave billions of dollars to immigration enforcement while slashing the rest of the government. They built new detention centers with names like “Alligator Alcatraz.” To meet arrest quotas set by deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents deployed across the country, breaking car windows and shooting civilians.
Last month alone, ICE made roughly 1,600 arrests per day. Despite the White House’s endless spin about targeting “violent criminals,” less than 4% of those arrested had a past violent criminal conviction. The Trump supporters who called for “mass deportations now” can have few complaints.
And yet Trump’s polling on immigration, long his strongest issue, has declined. In Nate Silver’s polling average, the president’s net approval on immigration is -10.7%, down more than 20 points from its +11 peak early in his presidency.
This decline reflects what Klein and Taylor argue is a fundamental problem for “end times fascism” — a new, sometimes contradictory alliance between religious fundamentalists, techno-oligarchs and rabid ethnonationalists.
Administration videos touting ICE deployments and racist propaganda may thrill MAGA users but, even among that friendly crowd, they don’t help the unemployed find jobs or families buy a house.
This tripartite pact has many of the classic features associated with fascism: a contempt for democracy, an embrace of violence, an obsession with national decline and attempts to channel public anger “downward at the vulnerable rather than upward at the system itself and its most privileged stewards and beneficiaries.” To that toxic stew, this version of the right adds that “a shared conviction that our common world is coming to an end” — whether it be biblical Armageddon, artificial intelligence-induced catastrophe or immigrant invasion — and only the chosen “can usher in the next phase of human history.”
Klein and Taylor’s incisive volume covers the consequences of this vision with far more depth and elegance than can be summarized here. But regarding Trump’s polls, what matters is that this bleak vision of a nation besieged by foreigners and infidels works better on the campaign trail and social media than when a movement is in power. As political scientist Seth Masket observed, for example, the GOP’s midterm convention argued both that “we’ve closed the border and also immigrants are coming to kill you.”
And because “end times fascism” expects instability and disorder (at least, for now), there is little incentive to improve people’s current conditions.
“Sadism is not a new addition to the fascist playbook,” Klein and Taylor wrote, referring to the White House’s videos of immigrants being loaded onto deportation flights, but “what is new is how little else is on offer.”
Previous fascist regimes used social spending (and, frequently, proceeds plundered from minority groups) to fortify their political base. Administration videos touting ICE deployments and racist propaganda may thrill MAGA users but, even among that friendly crowd, they don’t help the unemployed find jobs or families buy a house.
“This absence, we are convinced, is end times fascism’s greatest weakness,” Klein and Taylor wrote.
Americans saw this most vividly earlier this year in Minnesota, where the White House and its MAGA allies cheered on “Operation Metro Surge,” even after federal agents killed two protesters and a detainee died in custody. But instead of turning on immigrants and one another, Minnesotans banded together. And the administration learned that “significant parts of the MAGA base couldn’t be reliably counted on to delight in the one thing the administration really was ready to deliver: a campaign of ethnic cleansing.”
In 1985, Argentina’s restored democratic government put nine leaders of its military juntas on trial. From 1976 to 1983, the juntas oversaw thousands of extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances. Making his closing argument, lead prosecutor Julio Cesar Strassera told the tribunal that “sadism is not a political ideology nor a war strategy, but a moral perversion.” Some 40 years later, the Trump administration and its allies are learning that lesson anew. And it’s up to the foes of end times fascism to send a different message: “The best way to help people be their best selves,” Klein and Taylor wrote, is not prejudice or a promise of post-apocalyptic salvation, but “to make their lives better in the here and now.”
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