“The US and the countries of Europe live now.” He says it Mark Brayhistorian and professor at Rutgers University. Bray has been, for almost half a year, an exile. An American and Irish citizen, he landed in Spain in October last year for a simple reason. His life was in danger. The death threats he received from Donald Trump’s followers had intensified.
Bray published in 2017, when Trump had just begun his first term, the book . Since then history has run its course in a dizzying way.
Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in January 2021, Joe Biden managed to wrest the Oval Office from the Republicans but Trump returned to power in early 2025. Antifa It was declared a terrorist movement. ICE raids, murders of . Interventions in Venezuela, threats to Cuba and Greenland. The world has not had a break.
But for his personal story, Bray is clear about where to mark the turning point. In the murder of Charlie Kirk. Since it happened, in September of last year, the teacher details that the level of verbal violence and threats that both he and his family had been receiving intensified by several magnitudes. That made him make a drastic decision. He would leave the country until it was safe to return.
He has been in Madrid for more than five months and has now just given a talk at the Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation, at its headquarters in the capital. In his speech, which lasted more than two hours before a packed auditorium, the historian recalled how on a trip to Paris some friends jokingly told him that he came “from the future.” “But Vito Quiles’ tour It’s more or less like the far-right tours in the US in 2017,” he recalled.
“Perhaps you are the ones who be in my opposition in eight years“, he argued. “Just kidding. History doesn’t work like that. But there are reasons to be worried.” “I can’t do more than give them hope for the future, but when the parties are not able to address the problems, opportunities arise for the extreme right,” he warned.
“It is difficult to support Trump and be a nationalist”
Mark Bray’s talk takes place in an emergency context: the war that the US and Israel have unleashed on Iran is shocking the global energy market. The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, claimed this weekend because “the entire world should not pay the consequences of this war“. Spain has already announced to contain the economic consequences of this crisis.
And in that context came Trump’s fury against Spain, after the Government refused to allow the Morón and Rota bases to be used in attacks against Iran or Lebanon. The US president even threatened to cut off all trade with Spain at the stroke of a pen. Will he carry out his threat? “Good question,” Bray acknowledges in an interview with El HuffPost. “I don’t know if Trump will actually do anything: maybe it’s not that important to him.”
Where the writer and historian does draw attention is in the role played by far-right groups in Spain, criticizing the Government for its position regarding the war sponsored by the White House. “It seems to me that here it would be very difficult to support Trump and call yourself a Spanish nationalist“, he summarizes. Even so, he also concedes that it is “hard to imagine what” Trump is going to do with all this.
After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, founder of the Turning Point USA platform, Washington declared it a terrorist organization. In reality, the anti-fascist movement is not an organization in itself: it is a series of values that a multitude of individuals can freely support and replicate. Furthermore, the US does not have legislation to declare domestic terrorist organizationsclarifies the historian.
However, Bray draws attention to how shortly afterwards the Dutch Parliament approved a motion by which The same thing was done in the Netherlands: declare the Antifa movement a terrorist organization. “I have told my German colleagues: Trump’s executive order was going to have more repercussions in Europe than in the US.”
“Today the antifa movement is neighbors with cell phones and whistles protecting immigrants”
The American chose to come to Spain last year for a very simple reason. He was able to go to Canada, but the paperwork would be unbearable: in addition to being American, he is Irish, so he has a European nationality. Of course, his arrival in Spain was not without controversy. When he was about to board the plane he discovered that someone had canceled “at the last minute” your flight.
He told it himself The New York Times. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence”he said then. Finally, a few days later everything could be resolved and Bray flew to Madrid, where he has resided since then. “Some Italian friends congratulated me on the election. And some social democratic friends send me messages like: wow, congratulations, Pedro Sánchez, you’re there,” he said, laughing.
But Mark Bray is worried about what may happen in a few months in his country. “The dangerous thing is that Trump becomes desperate because he cannot win the midterm elections,” he warns. “Their policies they are not popular and there is division in the MAGA movement (Make America Great Again) about war”. And, above all, the possible absence of an alternative.
With one eye on Spain and another on the US, Bray stressed that “the extreme right has opportunities when the parties are not capable of solving people’s problems.” “The Democratic Party now has a strategy of waiting Let’s see what happens in the next elections“. The historian places more hope in what may arise from the citizens themselves.
“Trump wants to normalize that let’s see soldiers on the streets of the United States“, he added. “We have not yet reached the point of Civil War, but we are there.” He recalled that when he wrote Antifa spoke of the skinheads and his image in the 80s. “Today the antifa are neighbors with their cell phones and whistles.” And he made something clear. “What gives me hope is resistance. Antifa I wrote it as a prevention book. Today the scenario is different.”
