The Dictatorship
JD Vance and Stephen Miller keep getting this simple fact about ‘fascist’ wrong
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 Kellysaid 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 Kirkopenly 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 writer for BLN Daily. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider.
NEW YORK (AP) — About 3 million fewer people in the United States had Affordable Care Acthealth insurance plans in February compared with the same time last year, according to new federal data.
In the reportreleased Friday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suggested the 13% drop in enrollment from 22.1 million people in 2025 to 19.2 million this year could be attributed to a federal crackdown on fraudulent or “phantom” enrollment. But health analysts said it was more likely related to the Jan. 1 expiration of federal subsidieswhich caused a surge in plan costs that resulted in many people being unable to pay their premiums.
“We know that real people lost their health insurance coverage,” said Cynthia Cox, a vice president and director of the ACA program at the healthcare research nonprofit KFF, citing survey findings on people who had left their plans. “This coverage loss happened at the same time millions of people faced double or even triple digit increases in their premium payments.”
The new data, compiled in April but showing coverage in February, represents the government’s first official look at how people’s inability to pay their first bills this year affected total enrollment. That is because the figures capture the marketplace after a nonpayment grace period expired.
A federal estimate in Januaryshowed that about 800,000 fewer people had signed up for ACA plans compared with the same time last year, marking the first time in the past four years that enrollment had been down from the previous year at that point in the shopping window.
Cox said KFF expects the total number of people in the government healthcare program to continue to declinethroughout the year, potentially to a low of about 17.5 million. That would be a significant drop for the government’s flagship subsidized health insurance program for working-age people who do not qualify for Medicaid. In recent years, ACA plans have become a popular choice for gig workers, farmers, ranchers, hairstylists and others without health coverage through an employer.
The ACA subsidies that expired this year were at the center of a bitter fight in Congress last fall, with Democrats and some Republicans calling for their renewal. Sharp increases in health costs across ACA and other health insurance programs come as voters in the approaching November elections say affordability is among their top concerns.
Rep. Julia Letlow won Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary runoff Saturday, defeating former Rep. John Fleming.
Her win comes as a victory for President Donald Trump, who has endorsed her repeatedly throughout the race — including before she was even officially running.
Letlow made history in 2021 when she became the first Republican woman to represent Louisiana in Congress. In that special election, she won the seat that her late husband, Luke Letlow, had won prior to dying of complications related to Covid-19 in December 2020.
Letlow had no political experience prior to running for her late husband’s seat. She holds a doctorate in communication from the University of South Florida and worked as an administrator for Tulane University and the University of Louisiana, according to her LinkedIn page. Nonetheless, she won the special election House race with nearly 65% of the vote.
In Congress, she has served on the appropriations and education committees, and has been a reliably MAGA Republican.
Letlow’s win also comes as a rebuke to Fleming, who loaned himself more than $11 million, according to the Federal Election Commission, and tried running for the same seat in 2016 only to finish in fifth place in the nonpartisan primary. (Letlow did not loan her campaign any money, and took in more than $5.35 million compared to Fleming’s more than $12.1 million, FEC filings show.)
Trump has played a key role in the race. In addition to backing Letlow early on, the president also helped tank Republican incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy’s re-election campaign in last month’s primary, based on the senator’s record of bucking his party and voting in favor of Trump’s second impeachment. In the primaryLetlow earned nearly 45% of the vote, giving her a healthy lead over both Fleming, who received about 28% of the vote, and Cassidy, who earned nearly 25%.
Ahead of Saturday’s runoff, polling showed Letlow and Fleming in a close race, with Letlow retaining a small lead in several polls.
Letlow will now proceed to the November general election to face off against the Democratic nominee, farmer Jamie Davis, who came out on top in tonight’s Democratic primary runoff.
The state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, when Mary Landrieu won her last term in office.
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligencehas stirred fear by choosing as his chief of staff a GOP election lawyer who oversaw a poll watching program that included Jack Posobiec and other conservative conspiracy theorists. The lawyer, Christina Norton, also appears to have no experience working in the intelligence community.
“It is horrifying,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told MS NOW Saturday. “Not only does Norton have absolutely no background, experience or expertise in national security or intelligence, but her principal qualifications appear to be loyalty to Pulte and an embrace of absurd election-interference conspiracies.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who has been a vocal critic of Pulte, also raised concerns about election integrity on Sunday while taking shots at the director of national intelligence and the office itself.
“We should eliminate the DNI, and we should eliminate Pulte from the DNI until that happens,” he said on BLN, adding, “I am concerned that we’re gonna continue to cast doubt on elections in November and erode what has been a 250-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power.”
Pulte’s choice of Norton is also likely to increase concerns among Democrats that President Donald Trump intends to use the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to interfere in the midterm elections. Pulte, a loyalist with no intelligence experience, has used his current position as head of federal mortgage agencies to refer political rivals of the president for federal criminal prosecution.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told MS NOW on Sunday that the choice “just confirms” that the “only job qualification is absolute political loyalty and devotion to Donald Trump.” But he expressed faith in the judicial system during an appearance on “The Weekend,” noting that “right now we have federal courts across the land that are rejecting their various attempts to take over the election process. Nine different federal courts have rejected the claim that the president, by executive order, can compel the states in the union to turn over all of their voter lists to Donald Trump and to the White House.”
The New York Times first reported Norton’s appointment.
The former senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, told MS NOW the choice also “signals as clearly as could be that Pulte has been put at ODNI to misuse the awesome power of the U.S. intelligence community to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.”
Norton, reached by MS NOW by telephone, declined to comment and referred questions to an ODNI spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to comment on Norton but defended Pulte’s tenure.
“Acting Director Pulte and his team are focused on carrying out President Trump’s national security priorities while faithfully executing ODNI’s statutory mission,” the spokesperson told MS NOW. “We are leading the Intelligence Community to provide President Trump with elite, apolitical intelligence that keeps America safe.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, said his objection to Pulte is “that he used personal information to target a political enemy of the president,” a reference to New York Attorney General Letitia James.
“You should not be using the force of government to crash upon somebody just because the person in charge does not like them or finds them inconvenient. The fact that Bill did that is disqualifying for someone to be the director of national intelligence,” Cassidy said.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Friday that Congress would ensure that the ODNI under Pulte will “report on legitimate foreign threats to elections, not Donald Trump’s imaginary ones.”
Himes warned that, “Trump was explicit when he appointed Bill Pulte to a job he had no qualifications for that he had elections in mind.”
Trump has said in interviews with the news media that he would like to see Pulte shrink the size of the ODNI and investigate election fraud. Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, participated in investigations in Georgia and Puerto Rico to find proof of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Democrats and some former intelligence officials say they worry that Pulte may try to falsely claim that his office has found evidence that foreign governments are secretly funding Democratic candidates in the midterms.
Pulte could falsely claim foreign actors have hacked U.S. voting machines, they say, and altered vote totals in favor of Democrats during the midterms. Or Trump could instruct Pulte to be present if FBI agents seize ballots and election records in November as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned in a statement on Friday that Pulte should not use his position to spread Trump’s false election conspiracy theories.
“The mission of ODNI is to identify and counter foreign threats, not to import election denialism into the Intelligence Community,” Warner said. “Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections.”
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.
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