Before Donald Trump traveled to Britain earlier this week, he greeted photographers with a clenched fist and a grim expression. During his stay he continued to raise his fist, and when he finally said farewell, he did it once again. A wave and a friendly smile might have been more fitting, but the clenched fist has become his trademark.
“Who was he trying to smash?” asked a British journalist. “King Charles? Queen Camilla? Or the rest of us?”
A clenched fist has always been a sign of defiance, intransigence, or hostility. In the last century it became a universal symbol of revolt and revolution. Vladimir Lenin used it liberally during the revolutionary year of 1917. Numerous photographs show him with a clenched fist and white knuckles. For Lenin, the fist was a mobilizing symbol: the people should rise and overthrow their oppressors.
Joseph Stalin inherited not only Lenin’s party but also its symbolism. When he greeted the masses on Red Square, he waved his clenched fist. But for him it was above all the emblem of his own and the state’s political power.
Mao Zedong struck the same chords. Throughout the years, not least during the bloody Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the fist became part of proletarian iconography. Propaganda posters depicted young Red Guards raising it against the class enemy. Mao too posed in the same way, but in reality it was not the power of the collective he sought to display, but his own.
Trump is no revolutionary in the Marxist sense, but his theatrical use of the fist shows that he wants to appear tough and uncompromising. During the 2016 campaign he pumped his clenched fist into the air again and again. When he delivered his inaugural address on January 20 the following year, he ended it by raising his fist once more—a dramatic break with tradition.
The same thing happened four years later, when he was sworn in as president a second time. Many disliked what they saw, not least his predecessors sitting in the rows of chairs right behind him.
Before Trump got that far, he was the target of an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. The image of him rising with blood on his face and a raised fist flashed instantly around the world. For Trump’s supporters it was proof that he would never give up, and he himself claimed that God had saved him. For critics it was a reminder that he would become a very different, perhaps dangerous, leader.
Earlier American presidents never came close to such behavior. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman stuck to a pointing finger, an open hand, or a wave. During the 1959 campaign John F. Kennedy clenched his fist as a sign of determination, but he never did it as president.
Richard Nixon often chose the V-sign, even when it did not fit the moment—such as in 1974 when he was forced to resign after the Watergate scandal. Jimmy Carter is remembered above all for his mild manner, while Ronald Reagan never forgot his past as an actor and waved to everyone he met.
What is distinctive about Trump is that he has made his clenched fist a permanent element of his political theater. He signals that he does not care about criticism and that he will sweep aside all opposition, if necessary by force. It is him against the elite. Such posturing resonates in a deeply divided society where millions feel overlooked.
Meanwhile, political tension grows. Trump has in fact embarked on a project that, in the worst case, could eliminate American democracy as we know it.
In the Italian newspaper La Stampa, Bill Emmott asks: “How could the U.S. become a dictatorship?” In his analysis he refers to a passage in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. A character asks how it is possible to go bankrupt. “In two ways,” another replies. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Gradually, then suddenly. That was how it happened in Italy and Germany in the 1930s. People did not wake up until it was too late. “What frightens me most about totalitarian power is not its brutality, but its ability to make people passive,” wrote the historian Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).
Trump’s assault on American democracy comes as daily snarls and bites in every direction. Important parts of Congress are already pacified, the Supreme Court has begun to kneel, and countless lower courts are at a loss about what comes next. The nation’s leading universities are threatened with budget cuts unless they change curricula and admissions criteria. Major museums have been told to rewrite the nation’s history, and media outlets that Trump cannot abide risk lawsuits worth billions.
Last week The New York Times received a lawsuit for as much as 16 billion dollars. It will take a lot for Trump to prevail. The signal he sends is nevertheless clear: the media must watch out, or he will come after them. Not even entertainers and comedians should feel too safe, for Trump—the man who cannot laugh himself—cannot bear being laughed at.
Trump has never concealed his contempt for institutional power. Election commissions that do not let him win are corrupt. Judges brazen enough to rule against him are political activists. The entire judicial system is essentially corrupt. That is why he calls it “the deep state,” and the media “enemies of the people.” Lenin, Stalin, and Mao branded their opponents in the same way.
In the coming weeks Trump will search for new pretexts to persecute great and small alike. The murder of Charlie Kirk has unleashed loud calls for revenge. The entire MAGA movement is on high alert. New unrest could at worst trigger a spiral of violence in which Trump is tempted to declare a state of emergency—first in one city, then two, then more. As everyone fights everyone, he will grant himself even broader powers, for only he can save the country. He, and no one else.
The march toward the cliff naturally goes faster when no one in his inner circle dares to contradict him. Not Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, nor anyone else. For as soon as Trump senses that they are not applauding everything he does, they are fired—with a cruel farewell.
It is frightening that Trump’s personal tyranny bears similarities to Stalin’s and Mao’s. Equally frightening is that the president with the clenched fist still has more than three years left in office.
