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At the dawn of the second Trump presidency, defiance has given way to compliance.
While Donald Trump has rapidly and ruthlessly thrown the federal government into unprecedented chaos, the leaders of the Democratic party have offered up little more than limp banalities and platitudes. “Presidents come and presidents go. Through it all. God is still on the throne,” tweeted the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, at the end of Trump’s first week in office.
Asked who was leading the caucus’s pushback, the Senate minority whip, Dick Durbin, told Semafor on 23 January: “I can’t answer that. Give us a little time.” Another senator said, “We’re obviously in a bit of disarray,” though Senate Democrats have arrayed themselves enough to provide bipartisan support for a number of Trump’s cabinet appointees.
For the leftists and liberals who had hoped to see the opposition party mount some kind of opposition to Trumpism, this spectacle of capitulation has inspired a new historical analogy, or at least a new insult. La Résistance is dead. Welcome to Vichy France.
“If you want an analogy for the present state of America it’s perhaps not an out-and-out fascist regime, but a Vichy regime,” wrote John Ganz, a left-leaning author, in a Substack newsletter on 21 January. “It’s partly fascist but mostly just a reactionary and defeatist catch-all. It’s a regime born of capitulation and of defeat: of the slow and then sudden collapse of the longstanding institutions of a great democracy whose defenders turned out to be senile and unable to cope with or understand modern politics.”
Ganz was not the first to invoke the collaborationist regime that administered part of France after its rapid and spectacular defeat by Germany at the beginning of the second world war. In November, after Joe Biden welcomed Trump back to the White House and promised a “smooth transition”, the political cartoonist Ted Rall reimagined their Oval Office meeting as an updated version of the infamous handshake between Adolf Hitler and Philippe Pétain that marked the fall of France’s Third Republic and rise of the Vichy era.
“Unlike you fascists, we promise a smooth transition of power … to you fascists,” Biden/Pétain says to Trump/Hitler in the cartoon, titled Aloha to the Vichy Democrats.
Indeed, “Vichy Democrats” has become an increasingly popular expression of disgust with the feckless opposition party, whether in viral tweets (“The Vichy Democrats are really proud of themselves for peacefully handing over the country to a person they said was a fascist,” wrote the X user SxarletRed in response to the California senator Adam Schiff’s boast that the Democrats had certified Trump’s election without launching a failed insurrection) or a headline by Esquire (“Vichy Democrats take note: the Republican Congress is coming for everything”). On the alternative social media site Bluesky, the senior US senator from Pennsylvania, best known for wearing gym shorts to Congress and his recent rightward shift, has been deemed “John Fetterman (D-Vichy)”.
Others have used “Vichy” to denounce Jewel for playing at Trump’s inauguration (“Add one more to the Vichy list”), to characterize cooperation with immigration enforcement by a university (“This Vichy behavior should never be forgotten”) or as a sobriquet for entire institutions that are perceived as being collaborationist (“Vichy Twitter” or “Vichy media”).
Vichy France refers to the rump state that administered the unoccupied parts of France after the German invasion in 1940. France had defended itself doggedly in years of trench warfare during the first world war, so it was a huge shock when Hitler’s forces broke through the French defences in a matter of days and began to march on Paris. With the military on the verge of collapse and the government in crisis, some French leaders argued for a retreat to north Africa, from where the army could regroup and fight on, while others – believing German victory was inevitable – argued that an armistice would ensure the safety of the people of France and its captured soldiers.
Ultimately, it was a beloved hero of the first world war, Marshal Pétain, who signed the armistice with Hitler. Under its terms, the southern half of France would remain free of German occupation and be administered by Pétain’s government from the spa town of Vichy. Though Germany eventually occupied France’s entire territory, Pétain remained the nominal head of the Vichy government until the end of the war, when he was arrested, tried and found guilty of treason.
What happened in France between the armistice and liberation – and to what degree France’s own leaders were responsible for the suffering of the French people and the deportation and murder of 75,000 French Jews – would become the subject of protracted historical and political debates.
“The myth after the war was that there had been 40 million resisters and that Vichy was imposed by the Germans,” says Sarah Fishman, a professor of history at the University of Houston who specializes in 20th-century France.
After the war, the French memorialized Vichy as a regime of passive resistance that protected the population from the worst of Nazi Germany’s oppression while biding its time until it could rejoin the fight on the side of the Allies. But that fantasy was exploded by the work of the American historian Robert O Paxton, whose seminal 1972 book Vichy France revealed the uncomfortable truth: that the leaders of Vichy had willingly collaborated with Germany, and that much of the worst of the regime, including the anti-Jewish laws passed in 1940, were the expression of domestic rightwing politics and antisemitism that had nothing to do with Germany.
By the 1990s, France’s president had formally acknowledged and apologized for its complicity with the Holocaust, but defenses of Pétain and Vichy remain mainstays of the country’s far right. As recently as 2022, the far-right French TV pundit Éric Zemmour launched a presidential bid using provocations that included falsely claiming that Pétain “saved” France’s Jews. Zemmour was among the “crème de la crème of the world’s nationalist reactionaries” invited to attend Trump’s inauguration, according to Le Monde.
But what relevance do Vichy politics have to Trump’s America? And is it fair to compare Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer to Pétain?
“I don’t think Vichy France forms a helpful analogy with the US today,” Paxton told the Guardian by email. “We have not been invaded, defeated and occupied by a foreign power, only by the reactionary half of our own population.”
Fishman agreed that the politics and circumstances of the Vichy regime are far off contemporary US politics, and she strongly objected to the idea that Democrats were Vichyist for “going along with the peaceful transfer of power”. But she saw parallels between the behavior of formerly anti-Trump politicians and business leaders, including JD Vance and Mike Johnson, and Vichy.
“The leaders at Vichy thought they could negotiate a better deal by accepting a defeat, that they would get stuff from the Germans,” she said. “Vichy had bargaining chips. It had the empire, it had its navy, it had the threat of Pétain resigning. But every time there was an option to use one of those chips, they made it clear that they were not going to.
“It was a really bad bet,” she added. “Germany had no interest in a friend in France. They just wanted obedience.”
Paxton offered a different comparison from the same era.
“An analogy worth considering is Benito Mussolini, elected legitimately to the Italian parliament in 1919, named prime minister of Italy legitimately by King Victor Emmanuel III (though under some illegal pressure from fascist demonstrators who didn’t actually ‘march on Rome’), then illegitimately seizing full dictatorial power on 3 January 1925,” he said. “Along the way, thugs probably acting at Mussolini’s behest murdered Giacomo Matteotti, his most vocal opposition critic, in June 1924. Will something unpleasant happen to any of Trump’s most public critics?”
It’s a chilling allusion. But “Mussolini ended up hanging from a tree,” Fishman said. “Whether it’s Vichy or Mussolini, if you play it through to the end, it’s not good for the people who collaborated.”
Still, it’s worth considering whether American opponents of Trumpism should be looking to Europe at all for historical analogies and social media burns. After all, the US has its own history of abiding intolerable legal oppression of a minority group. That system existed as recently as the 1960s, and it wasn’t called Vichy, but Jim Crow. Many of Trump’s early executive actions have gestured at his movement’s desired return not to a version of the Third Reich, but to an earlier version of America, one before the civil rights movement, the gay liberation movement, the women’s liberation movement and even the civil war.
The idea that the racism, bigotry, corruption, authoritarianism and cowardice that plague US politics today are somehow French as opposed to dyed-in-the-wool American? That sounds a bit Vichy, doesn’t it?
