In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth reimagines the 1940 presidential election. Rather than Franklin D. Roosevelt, Americans sent Charles Lindbergh, an adored aviator and an isolationist, racist and notorious anti-Semite, to the White House. While claiming to have written "about the nightmare America escaped at the time," the American writer admitted in 2006, in Le Monde, when the book was published in France, that "even [Americans], free citizens of a powerful republic armed to the teeth, [can] fall into the ambush of that unpredictable thing that is history." Buoyed by the tide of anti-war sentiment in Europe, the novel's President Lindbergh rushed to sign a pact with Hitler.

On February 24, at the United Nations General Assembly, the US joined Vladimir Putin's Russia in opposing a resolution calling Moscow an aggressor in the Ukraine conflict.

A few days earlier, Donald Trump had held a warm telephone conversation with his Russian counterpart wanted for war crimes, before his vice president, JD Vance, at the Munich Security Conference, began to break the alliance with the Europeans sealed in 1945 after defeating the Nazis. A diplomat present at the conference told Le Monde it was "a fascist and anti-European speech." A few weeks of the Trump presidency have been enough to turn the nightmare of America turning to fascism into a bitter reality.

Fascist. The word, too often misused to disqualify any argument, the "Godwin point," is actually nothing new to describe Trump. Robert Paxton, an American historian of Nazism, used it in October 2024. As did John Kelly, Trump's former White House chief of staff, who, shortly before the November 5, 2024, election, predicted a "dictator approach" in the event of his victory.

'Underground demolition work'

Olivier Mannoni, who translated Mein Kampf into French, isn't afraid to use the same word either. In a highly illuminating essay published before Trump's election, Coulée brune. Comment le fascisme inonde notre langue ("Brown Flow: How Fascism Is Flooding Our Language", untranslated, 2024), he describes how the degradation of discourse and vocabulary in the US, and in France, has paved the way for the lifting of moral barriers, authoritarianism, dehumanization and therefore potentially fascism.

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