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This Is What American Fascism Looks Like
For nearly a year, Canadians have been discussing the danger posed by the United States. The anxiety shows up everywhere—online forums, polling questions, and in the unusually blunt asides from officials. This is good. We need to get in the habit of having hard conversations about who threatens us, the extent of that threat, and what we can and must do if we are to survive as an independent country.
To his credit, Prime Minister Mark Carney has talked openly about some aspects of the changing face of global politics. As the world now knows, he articulately described a “rupture” in world affairs at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year. In that same speech, he laid out a vision of flexible co-operation among middle powers in the world who are still interested in a rule-governed global order.
It is a good start, but more frank language is needed. Prime Minister Carney did not name the source of the rupture directly. For all the talk of “elbows up,” the federal government continues to avoid openly labelling US administration overreach as imperialist or authoritarian, even when it threatens Canadian sovereignty and democracy. On many issues, Canada has implicitly or explicitly agreed with the US, often in the face of all evidence. The country continues to spend billions policing a largely non-existent cross-border fentanyl problem. Increases to military spending have been in response to American NATO demands, even as the US president threatens a NATO ally and questions Canadian sovereignty.
Even the lawlessness of action in the Caribbean failed to draw any federal government official in Canada into openly criticizing the American administration. Donald Trump’s designs on Greenland eventually produced an endorsement of the principle of Greenlandian self-government under Danish sovereignty, but concrete acts remain a work in progress, with Canada often a day late and a dollar short compared to other democracies standing in solidarity with one another.
Most recently, the US secretary of the treasury, Scott Bessent, inserted himself directly into the debate over Alberta’s place in Canada by speaking positively about a move to create an independent pro-American Alberta. This is an egregious violation of sovereignty by a senior US official—worthy of ambassadorial expulsion if a retraction is not forthcoming—and yet, the Canadian government did not publicly respond.
The truth of the threat is simple to say but hard to accept. Under Trump’s leadership, the US administration has become a fascist, imperialist regime opposed to democracy and the rule of law, at home and abroad. And Canada sits squarely in its sights.
For Canada, the diagnosis of the US administration is not academic. It is the difference between managing a relationship with a flawed but crucial ally and planning a campaign of resistance against a powerful neighbour no longer reliably constrained by its domestic institutions.
Unfortunately, we see signs of deference everywhere.
Congress has effectively abandoned its role in holding the president to account. It has failed to uphold its power of the purse on things like international development assistance, bowing to the administration’s decision to simply not spend the money. The loss of that funding has already led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition. It has failed to uphold congressional power to declare war, ignoring military actions in the Caribbean that culminated in the unlawful capture of Venezuela’s authoritarian president. It declined to act when the administration sidestepped the Senate’s confirmation power by allowing Elon Musk to wield cabinet-level authority without ever being confirmed. Congress has also largely demurred in defence of its power to regulate import tariffs. It is, in effect, a presidential lapdog.
The court, for its part, no longer operates as an effective check either. The 6–3 Republican-appointed Supreme Court has become an often openly partisan body, willing to find judicial rationales for positions after the fact, such as signing off on mass, politically motivated, federal layoffs. This fealty was most openly in evidence when granting Trump what, in practice, is near total presidential immunity for crimes committed while in office.
Court decisions and congressional inaction combine to enable the erosion of other checks on Trump’s authority. States are rushing to change electoral maps following the Supreme Court’s endorsement of Texas’s egregious gerrymandering. The Department of Justice, staffed with loyalists, acts as another avenue of presidential power. The announcement of a criminal investigation of the chair of the Federal Reserve, the board charged with setting benchmark interest rates in the United States, shows just how emboldened the administration has become.
Pressures on non-governmental institutions are also clear. Major law firms were put on notice as the president moved to punish firms that worked for political rivals. Ensuing agreements with several firms included agreements to provide millions of dollars of pro bono in support of presidentially approved causes.
Similar pressures exist for media outlets as well. Networks and newspapers alike now live under threat of action by the Federal Communications Commission. Universities are likewise under attack. Columbia University signed an agreement with the administration surrendering significant autonomy over campus regulation—including the ability of students to speak freely on campus—in return for an end to a $400 million extortion campaign.
Others, watching this unfold, have learned the rules of the game. Corporate actors and foreign governments alike have seen value in paying to play. Switzerland gave Trump gold and was rewarded, for a time, with a reduced tariff regime. Many others have used Trump family crypto schemes as a way to openly seek to buy influence, making the Trump family billions of dollars in the last year.
For Canada, the lesson might seem obvious—and dangerously tempting. Accommodation can look like prudence, even realism. But what follows from this approach is not neutrality or stability but adaptation in the wrong direction: a gradual recalibration of Canadian policy to fit the whims of a powerful authoritarian neighbour bent on aggrandizement.
The US administration is not only authoritarian but plainly fascist. At its core, fascism amounts to a simultaneous narrowing down and raising up of some specialized conception of “the nation” over all others, using state-sponsored violence to do so, both at home and abroad. Thus, in Germany, fascism found expression in the elevation of a stylized and arbitrary concept of the “Aryan race” against enemies both inside and outside the country. Millions died.
The new “America First” ethos combines that same dual dynamic of narrowing down and raising up. Since its beginnings in 2003, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has grown into a poorly trained, lavishly funded paramilitary force with a stated mission to purge the country of so-called undesirables. It recruits explicitly on the basis of enthusiasm for far-right conservative politics. The Department of Homeland Security uses imagery associated with white nationalism in its messaging. The force was, until last week, occupying a major US city in an operation explicitly labelled as a “surge”—a name evoking American military action in Afghanistan—conducting door-to-door raids in search of anyone who does not meet the arbitrarily changing definition of what it means to be a resident in good standing in America.
These dynamics are laid bare in each fresh outrage that occurs. When an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, the US secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, led administration efforts to label the dead woman as a domestic terrorist without a scrap of evidence beyond the presence of pronouns in her social media profile. In his own comments, President Trump implied that perceived disrespect towards law enforcement justified the killing. The FBI agent charged with looking into the death eventually resigned in the face of sustained pressure to end the investigation, according to the New York Times.
Meanwhile, this is all happening in the wake of the twenty-first-century digital revolution. Huge power to shape public discourse rests with a handful of digital company executives, who have, in various ways, displayed loyalty to the administration. Secure in the protection of the US government, Elon Musk’s X platform, for instance, has become a potent avenue of influence for Trump-friendly politics, both in the US and abroad. The wider right-wing media ecosystem continually re-enforces the administration’s version of events even when evidence clearly refutes it, further insulating it against accountability.
To be sure, there are signs of pushback, most visibly around the brutal public execution of Alex Pretti by US Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis. Protests continue across the country. US elections will still happen in 2026—despite the US president publicly musing about cancelling them—but they will play out on terrain prepared by an anti-democratic administration. With so many now complicit in the corruption and violence, and institutions so far beaten down, it is an uphill fight against an administration and supporters with everything to lose. Simply put, there is no guarantee of a return to democracy following the 2026 elections, or 2028, or beyond.
Meanwhile, outside the country, America’s naked imperialism is evident in the administration’s very public designs on countries across the western hemisphere—including Canada.
This is the reality Canada faces. It is dealing with an American president with an insatiable appetite for expansion, no longer constrained by international norms or domestic institutions. The only language that works is power.
To be sure, there are risks in standing against such a government. Canada, like other western states, remains worried about alienating Trump. Indeed, with some 70 percent of exports still bound for the US, Canada has much to lose in any confrontation. Given this, some suggest that Canada cannot, and should not, try to withstand the US pressure. Instead, it must find ways to accommodate itself to the new America.
There’s no guarantee avoidance and conciliation will work, however, and plenty of evidence that it is actually counterproductive. Every agreement is subject to revision and revocation. The administration generates new crises over fabricated issues when it serves its interests, and placation has simply invited further humiliation and predation. As an example, Canada agreed to bolster border security measures, prompting Trump to issue a short thirty-day tariff pause in early 2025. The White House then mocked this as “Canada bending the knee.”
Conversely, as the example of Greenland vividly demonstrates, clear and unambiguous opposition with the support of allies works. Thus, the only course with hope of success is relentless and principled defence of our sovereignty, and our democracy, in co-operation with allies—particularly democratic ones in Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific rim, who face similar risks and understand the costs of playing Trump’s games by his rules.
While Canada obviously should not seek to escalate conflicts and must engage transactionally on issues of trade and security with the US, we must defend our values and interests relentlessly. If we fail to defend either our sovereignty, or our democracy, we may lose both.
The most difficult adjustment for Canada may be neither economic nor military but psychological. We must accept that the rupture in our affairs stems from the rise of a fascist authoritarian US government. We must act accordingly.
The post This Is What American Fascism Looks Like first appeared on The Walrus.
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