Trump’s fascist talk is
what’s ‘poisoning the blood of our country’
No, Trump isn’t Hitler.
But his copycat words lead nowhere good.
By Dana
Milbank
May 24, 2024 at 6:30 a.m.
EDT
As you’ve probably heard, Donald Trump has once again raised a führer.
The former president’s Truth Social account posted a video
posing the question “What happens after Donald Trump wins?” and providing a
possible answer: In the background was the phrase “unified Reich.”
This follows Trump’s echoing Adolf Hitler in campaign
speeches, saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and calling his opponents
“vermin.”
And that, in turn, followed Trump’s dining at Mar-a-Lago with high-profile antisemite Ye (Kanye West) and
white supremacist leader Nick Fuentes, who likened incinerating Jews to baking cookies.
Under the three-Reichs-and-you’re-out rule, Trump should be on the bench. Yet he keeps
swinging — and this week provided a sobering measure of how numb we have become
to his undeniably fascist rhetoric.
Almost exactly eight years ago, Trump attacked Gonzalo
Curiel, then the district judge in the Trump University fraud case, saying that
his “Mexican heritage” posed “an inherent conflict of interest.” In the uproar
that followed, even Republican leaders were appalled, and then-House Speaker
Paul Ryan said Trump’s statement was “the textbook definition
of a racist comment.”
This week, Trump did almost the same thing when he left court on Tuesday after his defense
rested in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. “The judge hates Donald Trump,”
he said. “Just take a look. Take a look at him. Take a look at where he comes
from.” New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan emigrated from Colombia as a child. But this time
there was little outcry from the inured populace, and if Republican leaders had
any complaints about Trump’s textbook racism (or on his third Reich moment of
this campaign) I must have missed them.
Vilifying migrants is a standard fascist trope. So is the
constant claiming of victim status. Trump falsely alleged in a fundraising
email this week that his opponent
conspired to kill him. “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out
& put my family in danger” during the FBI’s 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago for
missing classified documents, Trump wrote. He separately claimed that Biden’s
Justice Department “AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.” In
reality, the FBI took extra precautions to avoid a confrontation by conducting the search
when Trump was away and alerted the Secret Service. Agents were operating under
the same standard rules of engagement they used when searching Biden’s home:
Lethal force can be used only if in “imminent danger of death or serious
physical injury.”
Also this week, Trump, asked by Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV
whether he favored restricting Americans’ access to birth control, responded:
“We’re looking at that, and I’m going to have a policy on that very shortly.”
After the televised interview was
broadcast, Trump said the notion that he
would advocate restrictions on contraception was “a Democrat fabricated
lie.”
That maneuver — floating an outrageous policy and then
pretending he had done no such thing — is another tool that Trump routinely
uses. After Trump’s Truth Social account shared the video with the
slightly-blurred “unified Reich” message during a lunch break in Trump’s trial
in New York, his spokeswoman claimed the video had been “created by a random
account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word,
while the president was in court.” The campaign removed the post.
Sound familiar? During the 2016 campaign, Trump tweeted an
image that had been used by white supremacists of a Star of David atop a pile
of cash. The campaign removed the offending post and Trump said it had been
posted by a staffer. He later told a crowd that his aides “shouldn’t have taken it
down.”
During that same campaign, Trump also tweeted an image of
an American flag containing an image of what appeared to be Nazi
Waffen-SS soldiers. The campaign removed this post, too,
and blamed an intern.
The disavowal is part of the game, says Jason Stanley, a
Yale philosophy professor who specializes in the rhetoric of fascism. “You do
it and then you deny it and it’s just systematic, over and over and over
again,” he told me in a phone call. “The people who want to hear it hear it,
and it signals the direction you want to go in.” And for those uncomfortable
with the extremism, the denial provides “a way of lying to themselves and
telling themselves this is not what’s really going on.”
But it is. From Nazi Germany to Viktor Orban’s Hungary,
Stanley says, people invariably thought the rhetoric of the rising
authoritarian was exaggerated and just for dramatic effect. “Historically,
people always, always don’t take it seriously,” he said. Perhaps they don’t
realize that Trump is deploying the exact same tropes — against migrants,
judges, gender nonconforming people, universities, the media, “Marxists” — now
being used by autocrats in Russia, India and Hungary. “If you look at what
Trump is saying … everywhere in the world the authoritarians are saying that.”
And yet we drift, placidly, into autocracy. Okay, Trump is
unifying the Reich. But Biden is so old!
Trump’s fascist rhetoric is supported by an array of
authoritarian polices, which he and his campaign have helpfully divulged.
Trump has said that his (false) election fraud claims
justify “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the
Constitution.” He said he wouldn’t be a dictator, “other than Day 1,” when he would use absolute power to seal the border and
drill for oil. He has proposed that those shoplifting from stores should “fully expect to be shot.” He said he would round up as many as 20
million undocumented immigrants and,
perhaps, put them in mass deportation camps, taking money from the military if
necessary.
He said he would appoint a special prosecutor to “go after”
Biden, his family and “all others involved with the destruction of our
elections, borders and our country itself.” He said he would order prosecutors
to “go down and indict” his political opponents if they are “doing well and
beating me” — and he would fire prosecutors who don’t follow such orders. He
said he would use the National Guard, and perhaps the regular military,
to crack down on protests against him. He would strip civil service
protections so he could replace federal
workers with Trump loyalists, and he might take over independent agencies,
including the Federal Reserve. He suggested he would change laws to attack what
he perceives as “anti-White” bias.
Speaking at the National Rifle Association on Saturday,
Trump asked the crowd whether he should “be considered three term
or two term?” Several in the crowd shouted out:
“Three!” Earlier this spring, the American Conservative published an article
titled “Trump 2028” that argued the 22nd Amendment, which limits a president to
two terms, “is an arbitrary
restraint on presidents who serve
nonconsecutive terms.” The group is part of Project 2025, to which the Trump campaign has informally outsourced its
policy planning.