Description
‘Being right sucks’: This was scribbled on the chalkboard in the opening credits of The Simpsons the week after Donald J. Trump won the 2016 presidential election. In actuality, the long-running animated series had predicted him to win the 2024 race in Season 11’s ‘Bart to the Future’ episode (2000); this prognostication has now come to pass. My paper examines how popular culture has signposted the impending of rise of fascism in the US from Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (1935) up through what I am calling the ‘Late-Night Deathwatch’, the media assemblage associated with talk show hosts who have offended Trump and now nervously await his ‘retribution’ once back in office. Reacting to the October 2024 recorded interview with Trump’s former Head of Staff, John Kelly, in which the retired Marine general placed his boss ‘into the general definition of a fascist’, my analysis interrogates the premise that Trump’s second term signals America’s long-presaged embrace of fascism. I do this via an assessment of what ‘fascism’ looks like in the twenty-first century, Americans’ proven and pervasive distrust of the federal government, and what role social media, podcasts, and other forms of popular culture play in contesting and abetting the country’s growing embrace of authoritarianism.
