In 2018, Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale, published “How Fascism Works.” Although it was a slim volume, it ranged broadly, citing experimental psychology, legal theory, and neo-Nazi blogs; although it was by an academic philosopher, it was a popular book that prioritized current events over syllogisms. Viktor Orbán is mentioned more times in the book than Hannah Arendt. Donald Trump shows up dozens of times, and he is portrayed not as a distractible bozo but as a concerted aspiring strongman. “Fascist politics can dehumanize minority groups even when an explicitly fascist state does not arise,” Stanley writes. Elsewhere, in a chapter called “Sodom and Gomorrah,” he argues that Trump’s habit of extolling the heartland while decrying urban squalor “makes sense in the context of a more general fascist politics, in which cities are seen as centers of disease and pestilence.” Stanley couldn’t have known that many American cities were, in fact, about to become centers of disease, but he could have predicted that Trump would use such a development to his rhetorical advantage. “Some people would like to see New York quarantined because it’s a hot spot,” Trump said, late last month. “Heavily infected.”

Stanley isn’t, or isn’t mainly, a scholar of public policy; he is a philosopher of language. When he insinuates that Trump is a fascist—and you don’t have to be a philosopher of language to catch the insinuation—he means that Trump talks like a fascist, not necessarily that he governs like one. Still, many passages in Stanley’s book begin with a discussion of Germany in the nineteen-thirties, or Rwanda in the nineteen-nineties, before pivoting to a depiction of the contemporary United States. “Ever since my book came out, I’ve been fighting with critics who go, ‘You’re overreacting, you’re exaggerating, it’s irresponsible to call this fascism or that fascism,’ ” Stanley said. “I’ll point to a step Trump has taken—he’s using ICE to round up children, he’s surrounding himself with loyalists and generals, he’s using the apparatus of government to dig up dirt on a political rival—and the response is always ‘Sure, that’s bad, but it’s not a big enough step to justify the F-word.’ I’m starting to feel like the it’s-not-a-big-enough-step people won’t be happy until they’re in concentration camps.”

Stanley, a descendant of Holocaust survivors, acknowledges that he is unusually prone to worst-case thinking. (As my colleague Masha Gessen once observed, “It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room.”) Stanley has written that, during his childhood, his father’s “Holocaust induced anxiety was all encompassing”; his mother taught him that “the moment where one must accept that a situation is genuinely dangerous is usually well past the time when one can exit it.” He also acknowledges, of course, that there are plenty of big steps that Trump hasn’t taken, and may never take: imposing martial law, closing the borders, indefinitely postponing the 2020 Presidential election. Still, if Trump were ever going to be tempted to try something like this, wouldn’t now be the time? “A lot of us who were deeply worried about Trump from the beginning were specifically worried about what would happen when he got his Reichstag-fire moment,” Stanley said. (The Reichstag, a government building in Berlin, was set ablaze in an arson attack, in 1933; Hitler’s government blamed the arson, falsely, on Communist agitators, and used it as a pretext to suspend civil liberties.) “Trump is lucky, in a way, because the coronavirus is a real crisis,” Stanley continued. “He didn’t have to manufacture one. And now he’s acting the way strongmen always act in a time of crisis—grandstanding, hogging the media spotlight, demanding obedience. So far, at least, his approval rating seems to have held fairly steady.”

On March 6th, Yale closed for spring break and never reopened. Instead, like so many other institutions around the world, Yale has become a very expensive and prestigious series of Webinars. Stanley is still teaching his big spring lecture course, “Propaganda, Ideology, & Democracy,” now via live stream, from a red wingback chair in his living room. “The fascist leader is a tough guy who acts from his gut, who just knows what’s right by instinct and doesn’t need to rely on pointy-headed intellectuals,” Stanley said earlier this month, addressing a few dozen students on Zoom. “All those people who reason and say, ‘On the one hand, on the other hand’—that’s weakness and cowardice and decadence.”

A few moments later, a preposterously cute child wandered into the frame. “Sorry, it’s my son’s fifth birthday,” Stanley said.

“Where’s all the people?” his son said, looking at the screen.

“The people are hiding behind their cameras,” Stanley said.

A few of the students unmuted themselves and wished the child a happy birthday. Stanley thanked them, then kissed his son on the forehead and ushered him out of the room. “We need to get back to ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ ” he said.

On March 27th, Congress passed a two-trillion-dollar coronavirus-relief package, the largest stimulus bill in U.S. history. It included what Democrats pejoratively called a “corporate slush fund”—half a trillion dollars that could be doled out to various large companies, including hotels, at the discretion of the executive branch, which is run by a hotel magnate. But the bill also required oversight: a special inspector general, Glenn Fine, would monitor the spending, reporting to Congress anything that seemed amiss. President Trump signed the bill, then immediately issued a signing statement making clear that he would not obey the law’s oversight provision. (Asked about this by reporters, Trump responded, “I’ll be the oversight.”) A few days later, Trump fired Fine and announced that Brian Miller, a White House lawyer, would oversee the pandemic-relief spending. On Wednesday, the Treasury announced that, in an unprecedented move, stimulus checks would bear the President’s name, and Trump threatened to force Congress into adjournment, which no President has ever done. “When somebody’s the President of the United States, the authority is total,” Trump said at a recent press conference. “It’s total.”

Stanley has not rewritten his syllabus in light of COVID-19. Even so, his students can’t help drawing connections between what they see on the news and what they read in class—“The Origins of Totalitarianism,” by Hannah Arendt; “Conspiracy Theories,” a recent book by the philosopher Quassim Cassam; and, naturally, Stanley’s own “How Fascism Works.” On a recent Thursday afternoon, Stanley and a few of his students gathered (virtually, of course) to discuss overtly what they’d all been weighing privately: How does what we’re discussing in class bear on our present, and on our near future?

Lulu Chang, a graduate student at Yale’s School of Management, said that one of the course’s main themes was the authoritarian leader’s desire to control the truth: “Something that Professor Stanley says all the time is ‘If you take away truth, and you can’t speak truth to power, all that’s left is power.’ ” In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, she continued, “there was initially a sense that this was not going to be that big of a deal. And then, as it became clearer and clearer that that was not going to be the case, that narrative continued to shift, as though everyone knew all along.” (Trump, on February 27th: “One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” Trump, on March 17th: “I’ve always viewed it as very serious.”)