The Frightening Things Trump Is Saying

 

If one looks at what history reveals about fascists and dictators of the past - or Vladimir Putin currently - is that time and time again they raise the specter of internal threats, usually by already disfavored groups, as a rationale to destroy democratic government and to dehumanize those they label as foes.  This manufactured is also used as a justification to dismantle an independent judiciary which might otherwise bar the autocrat's rise to power or hold them accountable under the law.  Increasingly, we are seeing Donald Trump in real time use the tactics of past and present would be dictators in his quest for power.  Anyone who opposes him is being labeled as a "traitor" and/or "vermin" even though he himself is the true traitor.   Frighteningly, far too many in today's Republican Party for whom power are happily going along with Trump's fascism and ignoring history's lesson that those who go along with dictators often find themselves eliminated down the road.  Once dehumanizing opponents becomes the accepted norm, descent into violence is all too easy.  Look no further than all the Russian oligarchs and military officers who have mysteriously fallen from windows or down staircases. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the frightening things Trump is saying that ought to have alarm bells ringing.  Here are highlights:

In 2019, Kennedy Ndahiro, the editor of the Rwandan daily newspaper The New Times, explained to readers of The Atlantic how years of cultivated hatred had led to death on a horrifying scale.

“In Rwanda,” he wrote, “we know what can happen when political leaders and media outlets single out certain groups of people as less than human.”

Ndahiro pointed out that in 1959, Joseph Habyarimana Gitera, an influential political figure within the largest ethnic group in Rwanda, the Hutus, had openly called for the elimination of the Tutsi, the second-largest of Rwanda’s ethnic groups. Gitera referred to the Tutsi as “vermin.”

“The stigmatization and dehumanization of the Tutsi had begun,” Ndahiro wrote. It culminated in a 100-day stretch in 1994 when an estimated 1 million people were killed, the majority of whom were Tutsi. “The worst kind of hatred had been unleashed,” Ndahiro wrote. “What began with dehumanizing words ended in bloodshed.”

I THOUGHT ABOUT the events that led up to the Rwandan genocide after I heard Donald Trump, in a Veterans Day speech, refer to those he counts as his enemies as “vermin.” . . . “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

When Trump finished his speech, the audience erupted in applause.

Trump’s comments came only a few weeks after he had been asked about immigration and the southern border in an interview with the host of a right-wing website. “Did you ever think you would see this level of American carnage?” Trump was asked.

The front-runner for the Republican nomination warned that immigrants pose an immediate threat. “We know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. . . . It’s poisoning the blood of our country.”

Trump’s rhetoric is a permission slip for his supporters to dehumanize others just as he does. He portrays others as existential threats, determined to destroy everything MAGA world loves about America. Trump is doing two things at once: pushing the narrative that his enemies must be defeated while dissolving the natural inhibitions most human beings have against hating and harming others. It signals to his supporters that any means to vanquish the other side is legitimate; the normal constraints that govern human interactions no longer apply.

[I]t is our inability to regard other people as nothing but animals that leads to unimaginable cruelty and destructiveness.” Dehumanized people can be turned into something worse than animals; they can be turned into monsters. They aren’t just dangerous; they are metaphysically threatening. They are not just subhuman; they are irredeemably destructive.

THAT IS THE WICKEDLY SHREWD rhetorical and psychological game that Trump is playing, and he plays it very well. Alone among American politicians, he has an intuitive sense of how to inflame detestations and resentments within his supporters while also deepening their loyalty to him, even their reverence for him.

Trump’s opponents, including the press, are “truly the enemy of the people.” He demanded that the parent company of MSNBC and NBC be investigated for “treason” over what he described as “one-side[d] and vicious coverage.” He insinuated on his social network, Truth Social, that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for committing treason. . . . There’s only one cure for treason: being put to death.”

At the Waco rally, Trump declared, “I am your warrior. I am your justice.” He added, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, of which there are many people out there that have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” Trump has described 2024 as “our final battle.” He means it; so do tens of millions of his supporters.

TRUMP’S RHETORIC IS CLEARLY fascistic. These days, Trump is being “much more overt about becoming an authoritarian and transforming America into some version of autocracy,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at NYU, told PBS NewsHour. That doesn’t mean that if Trump were elected president in 2024, America would become a fascistic state. Our institutions may be strong enough to resist him, though it’s an open question. But Trump can do many things short of imposing fascism that can do grave harm to America.

Trump, after all, has been impeached twice, indicted four times on 91 counts, and found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Courts in New York have found that he or his companies have committed bank fraud, insurance fraud, tax fraud, and charity fraud. Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. He was the catalyzing figure that led to a violent attack on the Capitol. And he has argued for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

That Trump would say what he’s said and done what he’s done is no surprise; he is a profoundly damaged human being, emotionally and psychologically. And he’s been entirely transparent about who he is. The most troubling aspect of this whole troubling drama has been the people in the Republican Party who, though they know better, have accommodated themselves to Trump’s corruptions time after time after time. Some cheer him on; others silently go along for the ride. A few gently criticize him and then quickly change topics. But they never leave him.

As one Trump supporter put it in an email to me earlier this month, “Trump is decidedly not good and decent”—but, he added, “good and decent isn’t getting us very far politically.” And: “We’ve tried good and decent. But at the ballot box, that doesn’t work. We need to try another way.” . . . This sentiment is one I’ve heard many times before.

If I had told this individual in 2016 what Trump would say and do over the next eight years, I’m confident he would have laughed it off, dismissing it as “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—and that he would have assured me that if Trump did do all these things, then of course he would break with him. Yet here we are. Despite Trump’s well-documented depravity, he still has a vise grip on the GOP . . . .

White evangelical Protestants are among the Republican Party’s most loyal constituencies, and in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, more than eight in 10 white evangelical Protestant voters who frequently attend religious services voted for Trump, as had 81 percent of those who attend less frequently.. . . 81 percent hold a favorable view of him, according to a poll taken in June—after Trump was indicted for a second time.

It is a rather remarkable indictment of those who claim to be followers of Jesus that they would continue to show fealty to a man whose cruel ethic has always been antithetical to Jesus’s and becomes more so every day. . . . Many of the same people who celebrate Christianity’s contributions to civilization . . . continue to stand foursquare behind a man who uses words that echo Mein Kampf.

When are more Americans going to wake up to the threat we all face to our freedoms and in some case our very lives?