Donald Trump is continuing to follow the dictator's playbook. As the end of the year approaches, he has become even more bold and unrestrained. He is leading Biden in many early 2024 polls. He has not been significantly punished or restrained by the courts, yet. He has nothing to lose as his MAGA people and other Republican voters continue to be devoted to him. So why would he stop?
Despite Trump’s public threats to be a dictator on "day one" of his presidency if he returns to power in 2025, there are still people with a public platform, so-called experts, who are denying this reality. The MAGA movement is like a train that will soon crush them. Denial will not save them — or us.
Last weekend at a rally in New Hampshire, Trump continued to channel Adolf Hitler, with his promise to cleanse (White) American society of the “vermin” and human “blood pollution" he believes is caused by non-white undocumented immigrants and migrants:
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country. They’ve poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia.”
Of course, leading Republicans and other “conservatives” endorsed Trump’s hatred and threats. A new poll from the Des Moines Register shows how almost half (the number is likely much higher) of Trump’s voters support his invocation of Hitler and threats to put political enemies in prison. Why? Because Trump’s followers hate the same people that he does.
Trump is continuing to brag about his plans to enact the largest deportation campaign in American history when he returns to power. To accomplish that goal, Trump will deploy hundreds of thousands of American troops in this country – in likely violation of federal law. Trump and his agents have already publicly detailed their plans to impose martial law and to use the American military to occupy Democratic-led cities and other “blue” parts of the country. Again, this is a direct page from the dictator’s playbook and how democracies die.
Trumpism is a generational challenge and force that is much larger than any one man or movement.
Contrary to what some in the news media have incorrectly suggested in their attempts to downplay and normalize Trump’s increasingly unrestrained evil, the ex-president was not using “dog whistles” or “flirting with” Hitlerism and Nazism. Trump is almost verbatim quoting Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and other Nazi language and ideology. Trump knows exactly what he is saying — and like other autocrats and dictators he means it.
The Biden administration (again) condemned Trump’s channeling of Hitler and the Nazis.
And in a comment that was largely overlooked by the news media and other observers, Trump’s fascist verbal fusillade last weekend also included this mention of the “great” Al Capone:
Did anybody ever hear of the great Alphonse Capone, Al Capone, great, great head of the mafia, right? Mean, Scarface. He had a scar that went from here to here, and he didn’t mind at all. But he was a rough guy….Now, I heard he was indicted once — a couple of people told me a few times more — but I was indicted four times….
If he had dinner with you and if he didn’t like the way you smiled at him at dinner, he would kill you. You’d be dead. By the time you walked out of the nice restaurant, you would be dead. He got indicted once. I got indicted four times.
Trump idolizes gangsters and criminals. Properly understood in that context, Trump is (again) making another threat of violence against his perceived enemies.
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As part of a much larger failure to practice real pro-democracy journalism during these last seven years, the mainstream news media is now occasionally sounding the alarm about Dictator Trump and his fascist plans for the country. But these way-too-late alarm sounders have little credibility at this point. Why should the American people listen to anyone who has been so willfully blind to the obvious danger and instead chose to be quiet and in denial for reasons of careerism, fear, willful ignorance, lack of intellectual curiosity, or just gross naivete and adult immaturity?
In a recent conversation with me here at Salon, philosopher Jason Stanley was blunt in his assessment of such voices:
If you are just now realizing that Trump is a fascist, you're going to be looking for signs to assuage yourself that you are just being hysterical, because you spent so many years calling those of us who have been correctly describing reality, hysterical. The people who the media are turning to now as alarm sounders are not equipped to understand what is really happening.
Fortunately, some public voices are speaking with clarity, force and consistency about the existential dangers posed by Trumpism and American neofascism and how such forces are continuing to gain momentum. In a video she shared Sunday, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat said this about Trump’s Hitlerian "blood and soil" racial pollution threats:
The Nazis made the fear of ‘blood pollution’ of their master race and their civilization a foundation of their state. Italian fascists talked about the threat of nonwhite immigrants coming in to ruin white Christian civilization. Trump is referencing and prolonging and echoing fascist rhetoric. ...Americans will see immigrants be rounded up and treated badly, with violence, so he’s trying to dehumanise this group now, over and over again, to get Americans used to the idea that they should be persecuted, so they won’t resist when the repression comes later.…We should think about not only the content of what he’s saying, but why he’s saying it…. Every time you hear it, think about its intended audience and its very chilling intended goal.
I understood people in 2016 who voted for Trump. I didn’t agree with them. But in 2016, there was the choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton. I understood people who simply could not vote for Hillary Clinton. I understood people who felt they could take a chance with Trump and that all of the stuff they had seen was just an act. That once he got into office, he would govern like a normal president. I think that people who voted for Trump in 2020 and especially the people supporting him now with everything we know demonstrate a failure of character. I think that’s a moral flaw. That doesn’t mean they’re evil people. They may be nice to their kids and part of the Parent Teacher Association and good to their pets. But to support Donald Trump in 2024 with everything we know about him leads me to make a judgment about folks like that and their ability to apply moral reasoning to public life. I think it’s a character flaw. The most charitable thing I can say about people supporting Trump to this day is that they’re in denial. I can’t say they’re uninformed because there’s no way to live in this country and not know any of this stuff….
You can dismiss Trump voters all you want, but give them this: They’re every bit as American as any idealized vision of the place.
Political learning and socialization take place throughout one’s life. However, the values that we learn as children from our parents and other authority figures have a profound impact, both consciously and subconsciously, on our political values as adults. At the Bulwark, Jill Lawrence warns that “Trump presents a massive challenge today to parents across the ideological spectrum who believe in old-fashioned virtues like respect and civility. Other parents, those who admire Trump, are enthusiastically introducing their kids to the cruel and dangerous MAGA culture, and they appear blind to the harm Trump is doing—both to their families and to the nation.” At the Washington Post, Hannah Knowles offered these specific examples of the MAGA “family values” that were on display several weeks ago at a Trump rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa:
Children wandered around in shirts and hats with the letters “FJB,” an abbreviation for an obscene jab at President Biden that other merchandise spelled out: “F**k Biden.” . . .
One of Trump’s introductory speakers from the Iowa state legislature declared anyone who kneels for the national anthem is a “disrespectful little sh*t,” quickly drawing a roaring response. And outside the packed venue, vulgar slogans about Biden and Vice President Harris were splashed across T-shirts: “Biden Loves Minors.” “Joe and the Ho Gotta Go!” One referred to Biden and Harris performing sexual acts.
Some t-shirts for sale showed “images of Trump giving a middle finger.” One supporter Knowles quoted by name, Lori Carpenter, said Biden has to go “and the ho shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” The “ho” was Harris, Knowles said the woman clarified “before offering another nickname for Harris that was even more vulgar.”
Others made excuses for Trump. “He’s admitted that he’s no holy man. And neither is anybody else,” Matthew Stringer told Knowles. Marsha Crouthamel said Trump needed to “excite” people and she didn’t care because “his policies are strong.” Carpenter, who called Kamala Harris a “ho,” called herself a Christian who could “look past” Trump’s flaws….
Trumpism is a generational challenge and force that is much larger than any one man or movement. Healing, renewing, and then immunizing American democracy against such forces will be a decades-long social and political project.
In a speech in Iowa two weeks ago, Trump declared himself a type of Chosen One, a prophet-like figure, blessed by “Jesus Christ” and “god”. Outsiders may scoff and mock at such a belief, but Trump’s followers in the Christian Right do in fact view him in those terms.
At the Atlantic, Tim Alberta shared these personal insights (as excerpted from his new book “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism”) about how White Christian Evangelicals have aligned themselves with Trumpism and American neofascism:
I was raised in the evangelical tradition: the son of a white conservative Republican pastor in a white conservative Republican church in a white conservative Republican town. My faith in Jesus Christ has never faltered; I believe him to be the Messiah, the mediator between a perfect God and a broken humanity. And yet, as I grew older, my confidence in organized Christianity began to crumble. The disillusionment I felt was rooted in something deeper than sex scandals or political hypocrisies or everyday human failures. Perfection, after all, is not the Christian’s mandate. Sanctification, the process by which sinners become more and more like Christ, is what God demands of us. And what that process requires, most fundamentally, is the rejection of one’s worldly identity.
The crisis of American evangelicalism, I now realize, is an obsession with that worldly identity. Instead of fixing our eyes on the unseen — “since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal,” as Paul writes in Second Corinthians — we have become fixated on the here and now. Instead of seeing ourselves as exiles in a metaphorical Babylon, the way Peter describes the first-century Christians living in Rome, we have embraced our imperial citizenship. Instead of fleeing the temptation to rule all the world, like Jesus did, we have made deals with the devil.
In an interview with MSNBC last week, Alberta elaborated:
I would say one of the most surprising and discouraging things that I encountered time and again was when I would really press some of the high profile evangelical figures….
When you get these guys one on one Katy, and you really press them on specific things, specific beliefs, they’ll sort of back off a little bit, and they’ll even do a little bit of a wink and a nod and kind of signal to you that like, yeah, I get you, like, it’s been over the top. It’s overkill. This guy, you know, it’s not OK …. [for them] the ends of preserving Christian America justify the means of enlisting this uncouth, boorish, conspiracy-spouting individual who is issuing these casual calls to violence and saying and doing things every day that are not Christ-like….He fights for us; he’s our champion, and therefore, we can ignore the rest because the ends ultimately justify those means.
In a special edition of In These Times, historian Nancy MacLean locates these the Trumpian Christofascists in a much larger American (and global) antidemocracy coalition:
As dangerous as the Right was 10 years ago, it’s infinitely more dangerous now. They have captured one of the country’s two major parties and turned it against the factual universe and toward authoritarianism. One of the most troubling developments is the willingness of corporate donors — particularly in the fossil fuel sector — to rely on Christian nationalists to power their agenda. We’re seeing that all around the country, in really dangerous new ways — intimidation at community-level institutions from public health to election administration and schools — that are beyond anything we’ve seen since the attacks on the civil rights movement. It’s a really serious situation.
Trumpism and the larger neofascist movement constitute a national emergency. The growing and existential danger that such forces represent to American democracy and freedom should be the leading story across the news media. To that point, media critic Mark Jacob intervened in a recent essay:
It’s past time for major news organizations to take a bold stand against Trumpian fascism before their soft-pedaling of the threat puts the public in further danger and causes the news outlets themselves to keep losing credibility.
Here’s one clear way to take that stand: Major newspapers should run front-page editorials declaring clearly that a vote for Trump is a vote to end democracy….
When news outlets take a stand against Trump, they need to leave no doubt that they see it as a public service.
That’s why the New York Times, the Washington Post and other major papers should make Page 1 statements declaring that they support democracy and that Donald Trump does not.
Of course, such a pro-democracy campaign in the news industry should go beyond newspapers. In the past, when television personalities have engaged in audacious truth-telling, they’ve made a major impact on national events.
In 1954, CBS’ Edward R. Murrow confronted the fraud of McCarthyism. He didn’t “both sides” it. In 1968, CBS’ Walter Cronkite took a reporting trip to Vietnam and then told Americans they were failing to win the war there. Both reports are cited as turning points in public perceptions of major events in American history.
News networks must do more to warn their viewers about what’s at stake in the 2024 election. On MSNBC, anchors and guests regularly talk about the prospect of authoritarianism. But rival news shops are more cautious. It’s time for a news anchor to stop the scheduled programming, motion for the camera to approach for a close-up, and tell the audience directly that Trump wants to overthrow democracy and must be stopped.
Lester Holt, are you listening? Jake Tapper?
And New York Times and Washington Post, are you listening? Are you ready to devote a little space on your front page to help save the country?
The answer is likely “no."
Unfortunately, Trumpism and American neofascism including Dictator Trump’s Hitlerian plans are too often presented as one story among many instead of the national emergency they in fact are. Trump and his agents are publicly threatening to end the First Amendment and to put their “enemies” in the news media on trial (and worse). Instead of responding with the self-interested urgency that such fascist–authoritarian threats demand, the mainstream news media is treating this mostly as just routine politics and another day at the office.
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