I largely agree, and have been saying for years that people are drastically underestimating what a second Trump term will look like. The only counter I would say is that, while Trump is immensely powerful, and the opposition complete chickenshit, Germany and Italy are not the norm. There were unique historical conditions that made the fascist conquest of those countries so complete so quickly. Generally the country falls into some inbetween.

There are a lot of different interests at play in the US, a lot of institutional inertia, a lot of capital that does not support Trump yet(although capital will follow fascists if they think it the best way to crush workers).

Trump does have a genius at understanding postmodern media, and is himself sorta the incarnation of postmodern, which means an ability to feed desire and fear in his followers. But he looks woefully incompetent at the present moment, which is not inspiring for people to commit a fascist coup. He is also incredibly ill disciplined and fickle. The Nazis at least felt the need to deliver some material returns for workers with vacations to Spain and such. Doing everything you can to tank the economy and put yourself in an incredibly weak bargaining position with foreign nations as your economy collapses is the opposite of inevitable, indomitable strength.

Trump wants to mimic Hitler by sacrificing the longterm stability of the economy for shorterm growth(it's what every Republican does), but he has perhaps irreperably annihilated his greatest assett, faith in US credit, finance, and the petro dollar. He was in a situation unprecedented outside the modern US, being able to print huge amounts of money without the risk of hyperinflation. Hitler instituted huge deficit spending(and wealth robbed from those persecuted), to fund a boom in industrial production that lowered the unemployment rate. It was like a sugar rush, to continue required the use of massive pools of slave labor and the constant influx of stolen wealth.

The reason he paused tarriffs when the bind market became unstable is because the bomd market generally improves when stocks are unstable. People move their money into seemingly bedrock stable assets, US bonds. Those slipping, and the risk of foreign holders offloading huge amounts, would cause rates the US can borrow at to increase. With the tarriffs, this could further erode faith in US debt, which could enter a doom loop of rising interest rates requiring more borrowing to print money leading to further erosion into absolute armageddon until the US can no longer basically print money for nearly free.

The situation Trump is leading us to is closer to Weimar hyperinflation than Nazi sugar rush. Add onto this, if he actually tries to remove Powell for a loyalist, it could destroy 50 years of built trust.

This made seem ancillary, but it is vital to an overt authoritarian move. If doomsday pops off, he will try and use the military to put down unrest. The sheer breadth and lack of accountability of emergency presidential powers should be the front page story of every newspaper right now.

It is worth noting that Hitler never abolished the Weimar Republic. He trotted the Reichstag out every 4 years to reaffirm his Ennabling Act mandate. He never broke the law. He totalized his control of the branches of government, industry, and academia and used his mandate as a permission structure for the middle management to continue serving the Nazis. Trump is currently attempting the same thing, threats of investigation of congress, gutting the deparments, and arresting a judge while not ruling out arresting Supreme Court Justices being the most notable examples.

Trump could use the instability he causes to consolidate control, but I think it would be unlikely. Declare sedition and a national emergency, take control of media, set up road blocks, mass arrests, freezing opposition finances, occupying blue states. But a strongman needs to be seen as the only viable solution to a crisis, not the cause. He has a cult of personality built for around 30-40% of the population. Hitler had institutional backing, from the army, capital(night of the Long Knives was explicitly to gain these), and from the middle class. He lowered unemployment from 30 to 5%.

All to say, the worst thing for an aspiring strongman is to give an order that is disobeyed en masse. And with a tanking economy, instability, chaos, the people opposing Trump will come from a large crosssection of the population. Soldiers will not see a threat to the country in the protestors, they will see their moms, brothers, friends, and sisters. And in the Russian and French Revolutions, soldiers refusing orders against protestors proved pivotal inflection points.

Miller has suggested building a core military group of extreme loyalists from across the government. Terrifying, but America is massive, and during mass protests would be barely noticable outside all but the largest cities.

Masse defections, coupled with chaotic leadership(Trump is incapable of any other kind), a tanking economy, and mass protests would force the institutions Trump had almost cowed to grow a spine. To avert complete chaos they would have to reassume powers they have for decades handed over to the President.

So where does this leave us? Well, probably somewhere inbetween, further erosion and institutional rot, further corruption and capitalist capture. An escalation of the creeping illiberalism without a complete fascistic collapse.

Formerly when the US has reached crisis points caused by capital's evisceration of all life to market forces, waves of reform stabilized the boat. If Bernie would nit snuffed out by Dems, he could've transformed the coalitions, won the working class back, brought back a barely tolerable equilibrium, and removed the material conditions responsible for fascism(capitalism's domination over the government and working class, and thus its complete commodification of land, money and labor- side note, everyone should read The Great Transformation to get a handle on what is happening). But he lost, and we went down the rabbit hole we have avoided prior. But this also dialectically creates the conditions for its own antithesis. Trump will likely cause catastrophy without taking us a the way. The persecutions, deportations, stifling of speech, corruption, destruction of the common good, will open possibilities for radical reform formerly thought impossible. Already there is strong majority support for removing the Dem neoliberal old guard. Schumer would likely get wrecked by AOC. Talk of mass organizing and mutual aid, mainstream democrats calling for general strikes and mass disruption. This could give us a completely transformed democratic party that looks to Blair Mountain rather than the G8 and technocratic finance bros for its inspiration. If the Democrats actually ran on real change to oppose this they could create a generational New New Deal coalition of white and blue collar workers. The Dems held the house with one interruption from '31 to '95. Universal preK, college, healthcare, worker protections, and a litany of other things that could push back the markets from social life.

We could also be looking at the Marius or Sulla to some current 23 year old Caesar. But I think there is a strong argument that Trump would need to radically rethink giving the working class literally nothing besides spectacle and theft in order to consolidate power. Sorry for the length

I'm a little lost. I dig it. There are some very real and good ideas in here, but several arguments that seem disconnected with only a theme. Also, who is saying this? In order to engage with ideas one needs to know their broader contexts. Some say, the conclusion is drawn by anonymous people, can be a frustrating read. I don't take it maliciously or think it purposeful, but this is rhetorical trick generally used to create a monolithic strawman out of a group of diverse thought.

Nietzsche says God is Dead, but Nietzsche isn't claiming God ever existed, he is claiming the social conditions that supported the belief and perpetuation of a religious ontology had collapsed. Meaning the existing rationale for traditional ethics also dies. Who has unchained the earth from the sun? But he is mainly attacking atheists here, believe it or not. Check out the Madman in the Market. The crowd is atheists that do not know the profundity of God's death.Pointing out a lot of the loss of meaning that concerns you, and that humanism was basically trying to have your cake and eat it, sticking to Christian principles without God. I would argue the anomie, ennui, nihilism of capitalism is here. He foresaw this as the Last Man.

Marx says famously religion is false consciousness, the existentialists break with religion, Camus' absurdism, the list is a mile long, a lot of Critical Theory saying what you are suggesting about modern society. But the list of people promoting actual meaninglessness is rather short in my reckoning. It is not "God is dead, so this is all pointless", for most it is some iteration of "God is dead, so we must construct on his ashes, or rebel against systems of control, or create new values and overcome".

Also, most philosophers aren't so neatly bifurcated on religion. They draw heavily on religious thinkers, look at the Existentialists and Wittgenstein's use of Kierkegaard. The widespread admiration of Simone Weil. Deleuze uses Augustine's conception of a priori time as becoming and pulls its grounding in God. Philosophers tend to deal in concepts, and honestly the topline question of whether God exists is the least interesting a lot of times. They care about how the concepts produce insights. I have a Kierkegaard tattoo, and I am an atheist. His struggle and engagement with truth as experience, irony, humor, dialectics, philosophy as personal struggle all still are immensely influential for me.

When you mention The Matrix, are you discussing the Wachowski sisters or Andrew Tate, cause there is a big difference lol? The former are actually pulling the Matrix pretty explicitly from Baudrillard, I would argue as an overt metaphor. The book Neo pulls the floppy disk from is by B. Desert of the Real is his term. Their Matrix is loosely the Simulacra of Baudrillard's capitalism(not the only interpretation of course). His concern is not so much God as how the markets have created their mirror in culture to such a profound degree that what we engage with as reality is largely copies without originals. We watch kitsch retellings of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette, but they live happily ever after in this one, because the popular conception is that it's a love story, so it is pulling from that, not the original, it is more Shakespeare than Shakespeare. Then we go eat at Outback, built by guys whose conception of Australia is other commodities-so never referencing an actual place- as we look at streamers on our phone simulating friendships more earnestly than real ones. This is the hyper real. More reality than reality. Also meaninglessness. Trump is basically if market psychosis was a person. His amnesia, id, spite, will to dominate and humiliate, interest in exclusively people as means, all pure postmodern capitalism. This also goes for capitalist religion. Look at how mutilated fundamentalist Christianity has become. It is echoing and forging not the desires of Christ, but those of the market. God as exchange. Christ is a figure of material prosperity, competition, domination, consumption, and disposable spectacle as revelation. A Christian rock band sets up in a 20,000 seat arena to sell a mystical experience and send money to help Israel colonize Palestine. You can watch it on your phone. The world of phantoms for the Matrix analogy is markets, God as commodity. This is the domination of false desires the Matrix is concerned with. Andrew Tate is, like all Right wing grifters, a parasitic creation of the market. Preying on the very alienation the system creates, using its dissatisfaction to preemptively quell any actual dissent. His cure for alienation from capitalism.... post memes of him 12 hours a day, become a hedonist, start an MLM, become one of those whose benefits from the system...

All to say, I feel the description of these thinkers as bleak nihilists is misplaced. Nieztsche is explicitly trying to prevent mass nihilism, Camus, one of my faves, says the fight against the absurd is the ontological grounding for human dignity. We gain meaning in our rebellion against domination and cruelty, we become the absurd when we collapse into systems of control. I think you would find The Rebel really interesting.