Hey, Let's Not Elect a Guy Who Sounds Like Hitler

Trump is using straight-up Nazi talking points as he grows angrier and meaner.

Donald Trump nesting dolls on red textile

Saturday was Veterans Day, and former president Donald Trump used it to echo the language of some of the world’s most notorious dictators, authoritarians who hundreds of thousands of American soldiers died fighting.

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said in his speech. “They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”

He continued: “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within. Because if you have a capable, competent, smart, tough leader, Russia, China, North Korea, they’re not going to want to play with us.”

This is really, really disturbing. A former president, who is the current frontrunner for the Republican ticket in 2024, is telling his followers that their fellow citizens are sinister enemies who must be destroyed, simply for having different political beliefs.

Dictators including Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco have used words like “vermin” to target political enemies — communists, Marxists, leftists, atheists, and feminists among them. The idea is to render people with leftist political beliefs as less than human, and as particularly dangerous national enemies, quietly but deviously destroying the country from the inside. Once that’s established, it’s easier to render members of those groups as non-citizens, to strip them of their rights, and to use the power of the state to restrict their behavior: To limit what they can say and whether they can organize, and to punish them if they don’t comply.

Key to this strategy is encouraging followers to adopt an identity of both superiority and victimization: You are the true heir to this nation, but your birthright has been stolen from you by inferior groups that nevertheless have managed to gain control over the media, over the government, over the schools, over the culture. This was Hitler’s strategy in Germany and Mussolini’s in Italy and Franco’s in Spain, and it works because a great many people love to both think of themselves as inherently worthy and superior to others, and also believe that any hardship they experience is someone else’s fault. This is why conservatives can mock liberals as sensitive victimized snowflakes in one breath and then in the next voice a set of political views devoid of policy on material wellbeing but chock full of grievance and revenge for perceived wrongs.

This strategy works when societies are growing fairer and more pluralistic; it’s working in the US now precisely because liberals have made real gains. Those gains haven’t actually victimized conservatives in any tangible way, but they have resulted in big cultural shifts that mean the public square is louder and more diverse, and the minority of single white straight Christian men no longer dominate nearly every aspect of power and public life. Liberals aren’t actually enemies of the state who control the media and entertainment and the government and schools, but it is true that some of these industries and institutions tilt left, and it’s certainly true that none of them are run by and made up of white male conservatives alone. That’s enough to feed the victim narrative.

And nothing feeds Donald Trump and his followers like a sense of victimization, and a twin desire for vengeance.

According to the Post, Trump “is naming the people he wants to investigate and prosecute, and his associates are drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, which would allow him to deploy the military in response to civil demonstrations.”

This isn’t a single unhinged speech. Last month, Trump accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” a truly ugly and nakedly white supremacist statement that echoes Nazi theories that Jews and others were poisoning white German blood, and led to the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, It’s also worth noting here that authoritarian nationalist leaders routinely invoke natalism and traditional gender roles, including a strong patriarch and women whose chief duty is reproduction — and routinely pass laws controlling women’s bodies and pushing some groups into childbearing while discouraging it among others (this may sound familiar if you’ve been following the news in the US).

Trump has always been bigoted, and his speeches in 2016 were full of vitriol. But this time around, he seems uglier, angrier, and more dead-set on retribution. Which is frankly surprising — I didn’t think he could get much worse than he was when he was campaigning eight years ago. But Trump in 2023 has seen some consequences for his actions, perhaps for the first time in his life. He is in serious legal trouble across multiple jurisdictions. He lost an election. If his court cases go badly for him, it’s unclear what happens to a potential second term. Many of his enablers and toadies have gone to prison, or struck deals with prosecutors, or turned on him. He is a man who believes himself deserving of anything and everything, and he is a man who believes he is deeply beloved by real Americans, and so he is incandescently angry at those who would stand in the way of his deserved total power.

Donald Trump wouldn’t be a problem if he were just one man yelling into the wind. Donald Trump is a problem because millions of Americans back him — because millions of Americans can’t spot a con man, also want a politics of viciousness and cruelty, may happily turn on their neighbors and friends and family members.

Donald Trump is a problem because he promotes ideas that are radically at odds with what American is, and still enjoys the backing of the Republican Party — still enjoys the support of most GOP electeds, who either agree with him or have chosen to be reprehensible cowards. Donald Trump is a problem because when he calls liberals vermin and says immigrants are poisoning American blood and adopts any of the many, many fascist talking points he’s borrowed over the years, thousands of his supporters cheer.

xx Jill