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On 9 Sept., a campaign account for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted (or “X’d”), “President Trump will deport migrants who eat pets.” The same day on the same platform, Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance was ranting about “illegal Haitian immigrants” in Springfield, Ohio, and posted that, “reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” Two days later, Trump himself was repeating this in his debate with Kamala Harris:
“…what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War 3… What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States… In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there! And this is what’s happening in our country.”
It was a typical Trump campaign narrative: false in every particular (there has been no known pet-killing or eating; the Haitians being attacked were legal, not illegal, immigrants), aimed at demonizing and utterly dehumanizing a powerless “out group,” and to spark and create a justification for ugly retribution against that group. It didn’t just sound exactly like what neo-Nazis say about immigrants every day, Trump’s “source” was, in fact, a neo-Nazi group (called Blood Tribe). In the days that followed, Vance continued to repeat this and to escalate the rhetoric, continuing to pretend the legal Haitian immigrants were “illegal” and that they were responsible for “a massive rise in communicable diseases” and “crime” in Springfield (also false).[1] Presenting Jews as an alien infestation of unclean creatures who commit crimes, live like (and are) animals and spread disease were central themes of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, the groundwork for the Holocaust. Vance made the rounds of the Sunday network news shows repeating all of this.
And then on Monday — literally the very next day — Vance was on X whining that “the rhetoric was out of control.” Not Trump’s rhetoric or his own but the rhetoric of Democrats, for reacting to this sort of “campaign.” Their condemnations of Trump’s words and behavior, not Trump’s words and behavior themselves, were, Vance bleated, encouraging “violence” and assassination attempts against Trump.
In a sign of things to come from far-right media, Fox’s deplorable Sean Hannity had this written up and further circulated it.
Hold that thought.
At the beginning of the Trump regime, I wrote a pair of articles about “Trump & Fascism,” the first outlining the substance of fascism — so often treated, these days, as an empty political curse — and delineating Trumpism from it, the second a series of appendices outlining Trump’s use of fascist language and the fact that this had drawn to him a massive following among the overtly white nationalist/Nazi/fascist subculture in the U.S.. A third article, written in 2020, was intended as, among other things, an update, one that covered events since the first two and expanded their scope, showing how Trumpian protofascism was a manifestation of what far-right media had been preaching to its followers for years. It grew to book length then was, unfortunately, lost in one of those awful mechanical accidents to which this overly computerized age is subject. Months later, some of the surviving notes on that one went into another piece, written in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election. Our dysfunctional institutions failed to properly respond to that, just as they’d failed to curtail what had led to it.
Trump has only gotten worse since then, the accusations of fascism by his opponents — when his opponents bother to make them — only more justifiable. As, in fact, the examples already noted indicate, Trump has, of late, been delving into straight-up Nazism.
That’s what he was channeling in December when, paraphrasing “Mein Kampf,” he repeatedly said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our nation,” directly contextualizing his virulent anti-immigrant campaign as racist blood-and-soil Nazism. As that and the false pet-eating charge demonstrate, that campaign[2] has radically escalated in the current race, where he’s made one of his central themes the false insistence that immigrants are carrying out a violent crime-wave. In Grand Rapids, Michigan in April, he was describing them as “animals”:
“The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals.’ Nancy Pelosi told me that. She said ‘please don’t use the word “animals,” sir, when you’re talking about these people.’ I said ‘I’ll use the word “animal,” because that’s what they are.’”
In that same appearance, he outlined his fantasy that other countries are
“sending [to the U.S.] prisoners, murderers, drug-dealers, mental patients and terrorists, the worst they have in every country all over the world… They’re coming from all over the world.”
Sentiment he’s often repeated. Last week at a rally in Tempe, Arizona, he hit on the idea of calling the U.S. “a dumping ground. We’re like a — we’re like a garbage can for the world,” immigrants being the “garbage.” In Colorado earlier this month, he said immigrants to the U.S.
“are the worst criminals in the world… Our criminals are like babies compared to these people. These people are the most violent people on earth.”
A few days before that, Trump had been dabbling in Nazi pseudoscience, suggesting that immigrants commit murder because they’re genetically predisposed to do so: “it’s in their genes.” Reuters describes Trump’s rhetoric:
“Migrants who had come across the U.S. border were slaughtering people across the country, [Trump] falsely claimed.
“‘These are people at the highest level of killing that cut your throat and won’t even think about it the next morning,’ Trump told the crowd. ‘They grab young girls and slice them up right in front of their parents’… [They are] ‘savages’ and ‘predators’ who ‘sexually assault’ young girls… At a rally in the small Wisconsin town of Prairie du Chien last weekend, Trump suggested migrants want to ‘rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill’ the nation’s citizens and that they would ‘walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.’”
Trump has literally described immigrants as an infestation — a pestilence one kills — and, even more often, as an invasion — something one violently resists. Earlier this month, he told a crowd in Reading, Pennsylvania
“I will liberate Pennsylvania and our entire nation from this mass migrant invasion of murderers and child predators and gang members, terrorists, drug dealers, and thugs.”
…later described as a “nation-wrecking border invasion.”
One can point out that none of this is true, that all available data indicates that immigrants commit crimes at notably lower rates than the native-born, that even if one accepts “migrant crime” as a real presidential issue — and it isn’t one — it’s a microscopic one, that Trump’s “sources,” on the rare occasions when he even has any, don’t at all support his assertions, but fact-checking such talk completely misses the point, which is to demonize and dehumanize brown untermenschen as a means of politically organizing Aryan voters around hating them.[3] It is, on point after point, a direct appropriation of the propaganda of the Third Reich.
It’s the fascism, stupid.
Trump’s “politics” remain the same palingenetic ultranationalism at the core of the fascist project, and he pitches it the same way, obsessing over imagined national decline that he and his movement will fix, cast in a stew of populist and faux-populist bromides, raw hatred of those in designated out-groups and relentless authoritarianism.
“Together, they built America into the single greatest country anywhere in the world. But now we’re a nation in decline. We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower and its strength. We are a nation that has quite simply lost its way, but we are not going to allow this horror to continue. Three years ago, we were a great nation and we will soon be a great nation again. It was hardworking patriots like you who built this country and it’s hardworking patriots like you who are going to save our country. We will fight for America like no one has ever fought before. 2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the war mongers. We will expel them. We’re going to drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communist, Marxist and fascist, and we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will route the fake news media and we will evict crooked Joe Biden from the White House on election day 2024. The great silent majority is rising like never before. And under our leadership, the forgotten man and woman will be forgotten no longer. We are one movement, one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God. And together we will make America powerful again. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America strong again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again and we will make America great again.”
As that suggests, Trump allows for no legitimate political disputes. Those who disagree with him or who otherwise fall afoul of his “politics” are, in his presentations, evil, ill-intentioned, filled with and motivated by hatred, looking to do no less than destroy the country, they’re scum, dangerous, Marxists, communists, fascists — any word with a negative connotation, it doesn’t have to be consistent or even make any sense — and Trump, again echoing classical fascism, has explicitly said they, his fellow Americans who disagree with him, aren’t part of the “nation” he’s pitching, are enemies of that “nation” and are the greatest threat in the world to that “nation”:
“[T]ogether, we are taking on some of the most menacing forces and vicious opponents of our people I’ve ever seen. We’ve never seen anything like what’s happening in our country. The danger from within is far greater, in my opinion, than the danger on the outside of our country. That’s danger. But this is serious, the fascists, the communists, the serious socialists… It’s horrible what’s happening. But no matter how hateful and corrupt the communist and criminals we are fighting against may be, you must never forget this nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you. This is your home. This is your heritage.”[4]
Offering a vision that is fundamentally incompatible with a liberal democratic society, Trump’s authoritarian program is aimed at ending such a society. Defining everyone outside his narrow notion of “the nation” as enemies of the people — a phraseology most prominently associated with no less than Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin — he advocates that the state be weaponized against them. In May, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) went through Trump’s Truth Social posts and reported that “threatening political opponents” — and promising to weaponize the government against them — “has been a consistent fixation for Trump.” In Sept., NBC News noted that Trump “has become increasingly explicit in describing plans to use the Department of Justice to prosecute scores of people he has declared corrupt, if he wins in November” — something that, because of the recent lawless presidential immunity ruling by a far-right Supreme Court majority, he could do with virtual impunity. Reuters notes that Trump “has vowed to investigate or prosecute political rivals, election workers and left-wing Americans if he becomes president again,” and goes through some of the examples. In a Fox interview earlier this month, Trump said
“We have two enemies; we have the outside enemy and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”
…and recommended using the National Guard or the U.S. military against “the enemy from within,” which he defined as “radical left lunatics” and whom, he assessed, are a bigger problem than even immigrants (which, in case anyone forgot how much he despised immigrants, he then said are “totally destroying our country”).[5] This “enemy from within,” Trump has said, is a worse enemy than murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. He told a 7 Oct. rally in Wisconsin
“[T]he enemy from within, the crazy lunatics that we have, the fascists, the Marxists, the communists… Those people are more dangerous, the enemy from within than Russia and China and other people.”
At an 11 Oct. rally in Colorado, he said, “It’s the enemy from within, all the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country, that’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.” Doling out more straightforward Nazism, he told a November rally in New Hampshire,
“[W]e 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.”[6]
And so on.
Trump has, over time, liberally bestowed these labels on, well, everyone. The “radical left lunatic” and “enemy from within” labels have been directly applied to even some of the most conservative Democrats in politics — everyone from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris to Nancy Pelosi, Jon Tester and Adam Schiff. Earlier this year, Trump dubbed a “left lunatic” Robert Kennedy Jr., who was so “radical left” that, a few months later, he endorsed Trump for president. Many times, Trump has called the press “the enemy of the people”, “the true enemy of the people”, “scum.” He’s called Harris a “Marxist,” a “communist,” a “fascist.” “Comrade Kamala,” he says, “she’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist.” The 2024 election
“is not a choice between Democrats and Republicans. It’s a choice between communism and freedom. That’s what it’s about.”
Joe Biden is a socialist too, one “surrounded by fascists around the Oval Office,” one who is “running a Gestapo administration.” Conservative members of Trump’s own party who aren’t, in his view, sufficiently deferential to him are “Never Trumpers” who
“are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!”
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsome is “Governor New Scum.” Trump expressed his opinion of the 1st Amendment rights of the filmmakers behind THE APPRENTICE by writing
“So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far bigger than any of us. MAGA2024!”
The “people that surround” Nancy Pelosi are
“scum, they’re scum, and they want to take down our country. They are absolute garbage.”
And on into infinity. Everyone who isn’t MAGA gets tagged with the same language with which he’s described “the enemy from within.”[7]
This fascist contempt for liberal democracy is all over Trumpism. In my lost fascism article, I went into a lot of detail about how baseless “voter fraud” conspiracism by Trump and the far-right media that birthed and back him is fundamentally anti-democratic — a campaign in reaction to their diminishing electoral prospects that undermines and destroys liberal democracy, sold as “protecting” it. The subsequent 2020 election denialism by these same elements and extensive efforts by Republican-controlled state and local governments and election officials, premised on Trump’s lies of 2020 fraud, to hinder and restrict the franchise reinforce this conclusion. Trump continues to make the same fraudulent fraud claims and to insist he actually defeated Joe Biden. In Dec. 2022, Trump came along on Truth Social and helpfully made my original point for me, arguing that his fraud fantasies allow for the termination of all rules, including the constitution itself:
Trump, of course, launched a criminal scheme to defraud the government with fake presidential electors and generated a terrorist assault on the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overthrow the results of that election. The Sept. 11th Commission documented, in excruciating detail, the fact that Trump was fully aware, right from the beginning, that the claims of widespread fraud he was making in the aftermath of losing that contest were baseless and false, but while that kind of granular debunking is important for the historical record, it — again — misses the point. Trump uses this kind of talk as an organizing force to gain and hold power and neither he nor his hardest-core followers care a whit about the actual election results. For them, the only “legitimate” election would, by definition, have been one in which Trump wins. Any other result was, by definition, an illegitimate theft, with the supporting details manufactured around that predetermined conclusion.
That’s what happened in 2020. A fact given far too little attention is that Trump’s efforts to overturn that election didn’t begin in its aftermath. While president, Trump spent most of that year telling his followers that Democrats were not a legitimate political entity operating within the parameters of liberal democracy, that they were, rather, depraved, malevolent, a “radical left movement that seeks to obliterate and destroy everything that you hold dear,” that if Democrats won, they would literally be killed in the streets, that America would be violently and entirely ended. As I wrote in 2021, “hyperbolic demagoguery so far outside any reasonable or legitimate political discourse that it would require scientific notation to graph the distance” — essentially not only a declaration of open season on Dems but an argument that it would be suicidal, both personally and nationally, not to open a season on them. This was his story, day after day, a boilerplate fascist aggrievement fantasy that represented a complete abandonment of the social contract necessary for the functioning of a liberal democracy. As part of this, Trump was telling his followers that Dems, being such depraved creatures, were working to steal the upcoming election. “[T]he only way they’re going to win,” he said, “is by a rigged election.” After the election, Trump and his goons set out to find something — anything — from which he could manufacture a case for the conclusion he’d been openly pitching many months before a single vote had been cast, that the election was rigged and stolen from him. He came up with nothing, then tried to hold on to power by resorting to a criminal scheme then, at the end, to terror.
I covered all of this in some detail here.
Trump was, by every report, absolutely delighted by the attack on the Capitol, not only refusing to call off his supporters or do anything to assist its victims as it went on for hour after hour but tweeting an angry attack on his own vice-president, who was in the Capitol being pursued by a mob out to kill him for not assuming dictatorial powers he didn’t have by refusing to certify the election results. Later that day, Trump addressed the mob in a brief video in which — fully aware that he’d lost — he said
“I know your pain. I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side… It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us. From me, from you, from out country. This was a fraudulent election. But we can’t play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel.”
No contrition and the people injured and dead, the rule of law and democracy be damned. While continuing to repeat and vehemently insist on his “stolen election” lie in the years since, Trump has has called J6 “a day of love” and tried to present the J6 rioters, who, among other things, violently assaulted 140 law enforcement officers, as heroes. He’s referred to them as “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots”, “political prisoners”:
“The moment we win, we will rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner unjustly victimized by the Harris regime and I will sign their pardons on Day 1.”
He recorded a “patriotic” song with some of those charged with crimes for J6 and has played it at his rallies, saying the proceeds from its sales will go the families of the rioters. He’s tried to make Ashli Babbit, a Trump supporter who was shot and killed in the Capitol while trying to smash through a barricade and get at members of congress, into a full-blown martyr, recording a video honoring her and denouncing the law-enforcement officer who shot her as a “lunatic” and a murderer who shot her “for no reason.” When he raised the matter at his debate with Harris,[8] Trump seemed to suggest that it was an outrage that the Capitol’s defenders didn’t just let his goons attack and/or kill the elected officials they were protecting:
“Ashli Babbit was shot by an out-of-control police officer that should have never, ever shot her! It’s a disgrace!”
Babbit has become Trump’s Horst Wessel.
Instead of being condemned as a criminal and going to prison for his coup attempt, as would have happened in any functional liberal democracy, Trump has held on to his cult, escaped accountability and is now running another presidential campaign, with a credible chance of winning — a consequence of our system’s usual vile deference to elites, the incredibly bad decision to elect Joe Biden (who, predictably, proved to have no stomach for pursuing justice, until shamed into it), and the more general breakdown of public support for the liberal democracy.[9] Trump went into office in 2016 despite losing the popular vote and was able to appoint 3 Supreme Court justices who joined a court majority in granting Trump immunity from prosecution for crimes he committed while in office, which didn’t just free Trump from some of the late prosecutions aimed at him but, if not soon reversed, effectively ended the American experiment.[10]
A few years ago, I drew some objections for insisting on some subtle nuances in the discussion of Trump and fascism. At the time, Trump was, in my estimation, more properly characterized as protofascist, albeit one who did preach fascism. If one takes seriously what he says, that’s what it is. It’s a lot harder to justify those distinctions in the face of what Trump has said and done over time. The sort of things I’ve described in this article stretch back to Trump’s very first campaign appearance in 2015, when his description of Mexicans as rapists and criminals (and his insistence that the government of Mexico was engaged in a conspiracy to ship such elements into the U.S.) instantly made him the Republican front-runner, but it has gotten much worse in recent years, and it’s the thing to which commentators — both responsible, informed ones speaking in good faith and others — are responding when they call Trump a “fascist” or a “threat to democracy.”
That order is significant. Intelligent, informed people didn’t start calling Trump a “fascist” as some empty epithet, as so often happens in our degraded political discourse. It was because he preached and, increasingly, practiced fascism. If liberal democrats — of both the conservative and liberal Democratic, Republican and everything else varieties — argue fascism isn’t a legitimate political exercise, fascism, by its very nature, rejects their form of government and disqualifies them. Regarding fascism, history charges us with one mission: Never Again. We often do a pretty poor job at seeing to that but it would be a complete abrogation of our obligation to our history if, when faced with fascism, people of good conscience chose to ignore it, rather than to speak out and to resist its progress. It would also be insane.
That brings us to, well…
When Sean Hannity approvingly reposted J.D. Vance’s best impression of self-righteous outrage over allegedly harsh Democratic rhetoric aimed at Trump — rhetoric offered in reaction to Trump’s own words and deeds — it was exemplary of how this matter is being treated by far-right media. For weeks, Fox News has been an endless stream of this kind of fake outrage. Anyone who dares suggest that if Trump looks like a fascist, talks like a fascist and goosesteps like a fascist, he may just be a fascist is denounced as “reprehensible,” as engaging in “violent rhetoric,” and “encouraging violence” and encouraging Trump’s assassination (one of Vance’s complaints). In one rant on the topic, Emily Compagno found it “reprehensible” that a “dignified, wonderful gentleman” like “grab ’em by the pussy” Trump was being called a fascist. On the same show, Kayleigh McEnany raved that headlines in liberal publications noting that Trump was talking like a Nazi were “totally irresponsible.” Playing clips of various figures noting that Trump’s talk was that of dictators, she chirped
“Really responsible, after two assassination attempts, right? Nice. Vice President Harris, meanwhile, campaigning on the ‘Trump is a threat to democracy’ message.”
Harris Faulkner said of calling Trump a fascist, “this is hate speech now.” And so on. When retired Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s own former chief of staff, told the New York Times that Trump “falls into the general definition of fascist,” right-wing media suggested that Kamala Harris was inspiring assassination attempts against Trump by repeating it.[11]
The Republican congressional leadership — always choosing complicity with every Trump political atrocity — got in on this circus as well, issuing a joint statement condemning Harris for calling Trump a fascist.
“[T]he Democratic nominee for President of the United States has only fanned the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus. Her most recent and most reckless invocations of the darkest evil of the 20th century seem to dare it to boil over… Labeling a political opponent as a ‘fascist’ risks inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day.”
This was too much for CNN’s Jake Tapper, who, in reaction, offered a segment showing, among other things, clips of Donald Trump repeatedly calling Kamala Harris a fascist and many other bad things, which is, of course, what Trump has done with his every political opponent since he entered politics. Tapper could have pointed out, to those offering the same objections to calling Trump a “threat to democracy” that Trump himself has repeatedly described the upcoming election as a “final battle” and told a right-wing gathering in July that if he’s elected,
“in four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”
..and, conversely,
“If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country… I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country if we don’t win this election. I don’t think you’re going to have another election or certainly not an election that’s meaningful…”
But one won’t find that sort of thing in the appalling 24/7 mockery of moral outrage staged on far-right media. If one were to have the thought that, if anything, Trump’s fascism, rather than those who have only just pointed it out, is what may inspire assassination attempts, one wouldn’t get it from these outlets, because Trump’s own rhetoric and behavior, as covered here, is entirely absent from those segments and only turns up in others, wherein, with no sense of decency, the same hosts angrily roasting Democrats for calling out Trump’s fascism actively promote that same fascism.
It would, however, be a grave error to focus solely on the hypocrisy of these MAGA howls about Democratic rhetoric. Hypocrisy is an easy charge to make, easy to understand, easy to politically use but here, it’s mostly just another case of missing the point. These attacks on those who call out Trump’s fascism aren’t meant as a serious critique, certainly not as a call for civility (not even “civility for thee but not for me”). They’re part of the same Depraved Democrats narrative that Trump has been spewing for years. They’re encouraging violence in the guise of condemning same. They’re part of the fascism.
It should all perhaps be a Sobering Reminder that while he undeniably accelerated some bad trends, Trump is a symptom, not the problem, and even if he’s defeated, his followers and the broader right conditioned by this toxic media machine and the politicians empowered by it will still be with us. Trump has been priming as many of them as he can to reject any Trump loss this year as a fraud, just as he did in 2020.[12] Anyone wanting to save the American liberal democracy will have a lot of hard work ahead of them.
— j.
— -
[1] Trump himself had been presenting immigrants as disease-carriers since at least 2021.
[2] When Trump entered his first presidential campaign in 2015, he used his speech announcing his candidacy to say Mexicans who came to the U.S. were rapists and criminals and to suggest the government of Mexico was conspiring to ship such elements into the U.S.
[3] Trump has done a version of the same thing with transgender people, a politically powerless minority hated by the far-right. Among other things, Trump has been telling his followers on the campaign trail that not only are schools performing gender reassignment surgeries on children but are doing so without parental consent or knowledge, a black lie with no basis whatsoever in reality. Transgender people make up only 1.14% of the population but CBS News reported on 16 Oct. that Trump’s campaign spent $19 million airing anti-trans ads 55,000 times in the first two weeks of the month. Trump has promised that, if reelected, he’d use the federal government to roll back trans rights and both impose discrimination against trans people and force localities to do the same.
[4] To virtually no apparent notice by our dysfunctional institutions, Trump has been offering variations on that same sentiment in his stock stump-speeches since at least the Summer of 2021. He was offering a version of it at his Madison Square Garden rally this weekend, where, among other things, Stephen Miller — a white nationalist and longtime Trump hand — gave a speech on the theme, “America for Americans only,” a slogan and longtme theme of the Ku Klux Klan, and “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as “literally a floating island of garbage in the ocean.”
[5] Trump is, of course, as casually authoritarian as any fascist. A July CREW analysis of his Truth Social posts gives a small slice of this, reporting that
“from January 1, 2023 to April 1, 2024, Trump has vowed at least 19 times to weaponize law enforcement against civilians. This includes deploying state and local police, multiple branches of the military and federal law enforcement agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, FBI and Homeland Security agencies against people crossing the southern border, homeless people and protestors.”
Disruptors of “the nation.” In 2023, he told the annual CPAC Klavern meeting that
“‘he would use a second term in the White House to implement an authoritarian vision for policing crime that would include deploying the National Guard into US cities with high crime rates.
“‘I will send in the National Guard until law and order is restored. You know we’re not supposed to do that,’ Trump said in his address closing out the annual Conservative Political Action Conference conference in Oxon Hill, Md., where he easily won a presidential straw poll of attendees.”
[6] When some called out Trump for this Nazi language, a Trump campaign spokesman sought to dispel the concerns by telling the Washington Post that those who were complaining were “snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
[7] If the rest of this article doesn’t make it clear enough, Trump’s authoritarianism would be difficult to overstate. Cumulatively, he advocates centralizing law enforcement power that now rests with states, cities, towns and localities in his own hands, forcing police to essentially create a police state. He has said he wants to force local law-enforcement agencies to implement a stop-and-frisk policy — police just randomly stopping and searching people — which the courts have already ruled is unconstitutional (as if one needed a court ruling to understand that). He’s said he will “increase vital [legal] liability protections” for police that shield them from being sued for abusive behavior, “direct the DOJ to open civil rights investigations into radical leftist prosecutor’s officers” around that U.S. — that is, duly elected prosecutors — if he doesn’t like how they’re doing their jobs, “[deploy] federal assets, including the National Guard, to restore law and order when local law enforcement refuses to act.” While president, Trump rescinded President Obama’s executive order barring the transfer of military-grade weapons and equipment to civilian law enforcement and resumed those transfers; Biden reimplemented it and now, Trump promises to do away with the ban again. Trump has promised to implement the death penalty for drug dealers. He’s advocated revoking the citizenship of anyone burning an American flag in protest and sending them to prison for a year. He’s pledged to deport demonstrators protesting Israeli mass murder in Gaza (“[I]f you get me reelected, we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years,” he said). In 2016, Trump pushed for a complete ban on Muslims entering the U.S., which, once he was in office, was whittled down to a ban on travelers from predominately Muslim countries. He’s pledged to bring back and strengthen this ban.
“I will ban refugee resettlement from terror infested areas like the Gaza Strip, and we will seal our border and bring back the travel ban… Remember the famous travel ban? We didn’t take people from certain areas of the world. We’re not taking them from infested countries.”
Some of the new restrictions on entry into the U.S. he’s advocated:
“I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants. If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you don’t like our religion — which a lot of them don’t — if you sympathize with the jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in. Right? We don’t want you! Get out of here!”
And:
“I will order my government to deny entry to all communists and all Marxists. Those who come to and join our country must love our country. We want them to love our country. We don’t want ’em when they want to destroy our country… So we’re going to keep foreign Christian hating Communists, Marxists and Socialists out of America.”
And “what do we do with the ones who are already here?” he asked. “I think we have to pass a new law for them.”
In foreign affairs, the story is the same. Using his long-running firehose-of-falsehoods approach, Trump posed as an anti-war candidate at times while, at the same time, advocating a persistently belligerent foreign policy. During his first administration, Trump
“[escalated] conflict in every theatre of war he inherited, repeatedly brought the country to the brink of new wars, and recklessly threw around U.S. power with no regard for the many lives it would cost… Trump’s foreign policy was characterized above all by an aversion to diplomacy and a knee-jerk reliance on hostility. Attacking diplomatic relations and torpedoing successful multilateral agreements like the Iran nuclear deal, Trump instead tried to strongarm other countries into doing his bidding through threatening rhetoric, military brinkmanship, and suffocating sanctions. The result? Not a single one of Trump’s targets for hybrid warfare is any closer to doing his bidding now than when he started (often for the best). In the meantime, countless thousands have suffered the consequences.”
And so on.
[8] In that same clip, Trump suggested that he told the J6 crowd to protest “peacefully and patriotically,” but while, in real time, he said they would protest in that way — in a single throwaway line that seemed to have been included solely with an eye toward dodging legal liability later — he never, in fact, suggested to them that course of action, in a speech devoted to telling an angry mob the election had been stolen from them and they needed to fight against this. Continuing, Trump entirely washed his hands of any responsibility for anything bad that happened.
[9] That breakdown is apparent across the political spectrum, where MAGA Republicans are boldly anti-democratic but in the name of protecting democracy while Clintonite-right “Democrats” pose as defenders of the liberal democracy while trying to kick third-party candidates off ballots.
[10] Faced with conviction and prison, Trump ran to the courts with the notion that presidents enjoyed “absolute” legal immunity for crimes committed while in office, his “lawyer” agreeing, during argument, that a president could order SEAL Team 6 to execute his political rivals and that immunity would still apply, unless he was first impeached and removed from office — a thing the same president could avoid by simply having the same SEALs also kill enough members of congress to prevent a quorum. While it reflected Trump’s authoritarian view of his own power (and why he never should have been president in the first place), it was an entirely frivolous claim, directly at odds with the entire American experiment and made solely as one of Trump’s many delaying tactics, but shockingly, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, where the case eventually landed, ruled in Trump’s favor, holding that the constitution was unconstitutional and the president above the law.
[11] Kelly is one of many former Trump officials who have offered this characterization of their former boss. When asked about why so many of his own former officials refuse to support him in the present campaign, Trump claimed that “the people who don’t support are a very small portion. We have a tremendous — about 97% of the people in the administration support me.” In reality, half of Trump’s own cabinet officials have refused to endorse him for reelection, as has his Vice President, after Trump essentially tried to have him killed on J6.
[12] MAGA has been working on 2024 for years now, putting in place all manner of new voting restrictions, absurd, illegal and unconstitutional rules, crackpot election officials who spread outlandish misinformation and vow to challenge the results without regard for whether they have any authority to do so, and filing scores of lawsuits to try to restrict the franchise, manipulate the outcome of the vote and cast doubt on its ultimate results, should Trump lose.
