Back in January 2017, when I discussed the 12 Early Warning Signs of Fascism, which briefly made me internet famous in India, I noted that the newly-minted Trump administration was already checking all the boxes.

1. Powerful and continuing nationalism
2. Disdain for human rights
3. Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
4. Rampant sexism
5. Controlled mass media
6. Obsession with national security
7. Religion and government intertwined
8. Corporate power protected
9. Labor power suppressed
10. Disdain for intellectual and the arts
11. Obsession with crime and punishment
12. Rampant cronyism and corruption

Things have advanced since then on every front. Just on point five, Trump and Musk now own major social media outlets and several influential newspapers refused to endorse Harris out of fear of retaliation. On point nine, I wrote at the time something that looks awfully prescient at the moment:

Overall, Trump will go after unions across the board, especially public service unions and government employees.

But one thing that wasn’t on the list was territorial expansion. This was key component of German and Italian fascism, but much less so for Franco’s Spain where maintaining colonial possessions was more the focus than gaining new ones. I’m not sure that gaining lebensraum is an essential feature of fascism and I did not anticipate that it would be a key feature of Trump’s second term in office.

But seeking territorial expansion is certainly consistent with traditional fascism and so Trump’s ambition to buy Greenland, annex Canada and conquer the Gaza Strip should probably not come as some big surprise. This is a fascist movement and it acts like it.

The New York Times published an article on Friday on how the Canadians became convinced that Trump is serious about annexing their country. The most revealing part of it comes from things that happened behind the scenes in talks with Trump and some of his top officials.

Prominently featured is an early February phone conversation between not-yet-confirmed Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Canada’s finance minister, Dominic LeBlanc. Lutnick informed LeBlanc that Trump “had come to realize that the relationship between the United States and Canada was governed by a slew of agreements and treaties that were easy to abandon [and] was interested in doing just that.”

[Trump] wanted to eject Canada out of an intelligence-sharing group known as the Five Eyes that also includes Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

He wanted to tear up the Great Lakes agreements and conventions between the two nations that lay out how they share and manage Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario.

And he is also reviewing military cooperation between the two countries, particularly the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

Even more alarming is that Trump told outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau directly that he does not believe that the 1908 treaty that established the modern border between the USA and Canada is valid and he wants to revisit it.

Collectively, these threatening moves combined with aggressive tariffs Trump has proposed and then mostly delayed give the Canadian leadership the impression that Trump is serious about annexation. Trudeau decided to be quite open about this.

“The excuse that he’s giving for these tariffs today of fentanyl is completely bogus, completely unjustified, completely false,” Mr. Trudeau told the news media in Ottawa [on Tuesday].

“What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us,” he added.

Lest you think this is alarmism, it’s backed by the fact Trump told a New York Times reporter on January 7 that he planned to use “economic force” rather than military force to annex Canada. And for further bolstering evidence, there are no indications that Trump is less than serious about his plans for Greenland and Gaza. I supposed we shouldn’t neglect mentioning his plans for the Panama Canal, either.

If you primarily think about fascism in terms of the Holocaust, perhaps all this evidence isn’t convincing. But extermination camps are merely the most extreme expression of fascism. Trump’s indifference to human life can be seen everywhere you look, whether it’s the millions of lives his foreign aid cuts are putting at risk from AIDS, malaria or famine or the fate he has in store for Ukrainians and Gazans, the political refugees from Afghanistan, Haiti and elsewhere, the people who will lose food security and health care access here at home, or the promise to accelerate rather than combat climate change.

And that doesn’t even get to the inevitable need to resort to violence if he actually tries to go ahead with his plans in Canada and Gaza. He can rack up a gigantic death toll without the help of Einsatzgruppen or gas chambers.

And one final point. The fascists from the World War Two era are responsible for a lot of death purely through incompetence and unrealistic thinking. Ill-considered policies can be just deadly as fanatical ones. Look no further than the death toll from measles in Samoa that can be put right on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s doorstep.

True fascism is malevolent from every angle, and each day will be worse than the last until this fascist regime is defeated.